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Fall Literary Series Benefiting
826 Valencia Scholarship Program

Cultural Studies

On Art & Politics

Social Studies

Talking Music

Special Events

California Academy of
Science Series

 Herbst Theatre

Tickets:
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415.392.4400

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Linda Carroll & Ann Fessler "On Adoption"

In conversation with Michael Krasny

Wednesday, April 16, 2008  |  Herbst Theatre, 8pm

Writer and psychologist Linda Carroll was adopted at birth and raised in San Francisco. When her estranged eldest daughter Courtney Love became pregnant, Carroll decided to seek out her biological mother, who she later discovered was the writer Paula Fox. Her story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter and the mother of a famously volatile musician is told in Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love.

Ann Fessler was nearly fifty-six when she first met her biological mother. By that time, she had collected over 100 oral histories for her book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Demonstrating how good intentions can produce devastating outcomes, The Girls Who Went Away considers the legacy of shame and guilt suffered by mothers who returned to their "normal lives" after being separated from their infants. Fessler's intimate study gives voice to those young single American women told to put their pasts behind them and move on; as one subject confessed, "It's as if I was the unwilling accomplice in the kidnapping of my own child." Ann Fessler is a video installation artist and professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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