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Zoë Heller

In conversation with Vendela Vida

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 |  Herbst Theatre, 8pm

Zoë Heller is the British author of three novels, Everything You Know, What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal, and, most recently, The Believers. The 2006 film version of Notes on a Scandal starred Judi Dench as Barbara Covett, an aging teacher who is chillingly obsessed with her younger colleague, played by Cate Blanchett. Heller's books reveal a writer of depth and range. More often than not, her characters are fascinatingly flawed, with a great capacity for personal destruction. Zoë Heller began her career as a journalist, writing columns for Britain's Sunday Times and Telegraph, in which she chronicled society with scathing wit and an eye to the absurd. Her skill as an observer of people gives her fiction a conspiratorial feel, even as the richly detailed characters she creates might be people one wouldn't wish on a worst enemy. The Believers follows the Litvinoff family, bohemian activists of lower Manhattan, and their three grown children, all attempting to find something worth believing in the aftermath the stroke that Joel Litvinoff, the head of the family, suffers at the beginning of the book.

Vendela Vida is the author of the critically acclaimed novels And Now You can Go, Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, as well as of Girls on the Verge, a journalistic account of female initiation rituals. She received the Kate Chopin Award for Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Vida co-founded and co-edits The Believer, a monthly nonfiction magazine that includes critical pieces, advice, reviews and in-depth interviews. She is also a co-founder, with husband Dave Eggers, of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center with chapters in seven cities across the country.

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