The Long Answer by Anna Hogeland: A Virtual Reading and Conversation

Hub City Bookshop welcomes Anna Hogeland to Crowdcast for a reading and discussion of her debut novel, The Long Answer. A book about "women making life and losing life," the novel tackles pregnancy, childbirth, parenthood, and all of the uncertainty and complexity involved in reproductive choice. Hogeland will be joined in conversation by author Grace Talusan, whose memoir The Body Papers won the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction and the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

This event will take place via Crowdcast at 6pm on Tuesday, July 19th. Don't miss what's sure to be a profound and enlivening conversation! Register using the link below.

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About the Book

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.

Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna’s own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
 
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

Praise for The Long Answer

“A breathtaking roundup of the many ways that women carry and lose babies and pregnancies, so many possible and impossible choices to be made, so many capitulations and coercions to be endured. All the narratives in the novel make clear that the only thing that makes any of it bearable is the agency each woman can claim…These stories are crucial.” – The New York Times Book Review

“A compelling, often-heartbreaking tale of belonging, loss, and rebirth. Looking beyond pregnancy’s physical transformations, Hogeland explores what it means to feel parental, to choose a life bigger than your own, or to lose a precious gift…The Long Answer is a heartfelt, finely wrought journey for fans of Suzanne Finnamore, Erica Jong, and Marian Keyes.” – Booklist, starred review
 
“An introspective, psychologically astute, and engaging debut… a heart-rending tale that blurs the line between fiction and reality…A startling meditation on grief and family and betrayal and the stories we tell about ourselves.” – Kirkus, starred review

“I’ve never read a book that speaks so bravely, and eloquently, about the burdens that women carry. Hogeland brings moments of darkness into the light. Astonishing. A masterpiece.” – Steve Almond, New York Times-bestselling author of All the Secrets of the World

About the Author

Anna Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont.

About the Conversation Partner

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught writing for many years at Tufts University and Grub Street, and is currently the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. Her short story, "The Book of Life and Death," was the Boston Book Festival's 2020 One City One Story pick and she published dispatches from the pandemic in the anthologies, And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again and Alone Together, which raise funds for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.