Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Jean Hanff Korelitz & Dani Shapiro: A Conversation

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Plot, You Should Have Known (which aired on HBO in October 2020 as The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, and Donald Sutherland), Admission (adapted as a film in 2013 starring Tina Fey), The Devil and Webster, The White Rose, The Sabbathday River, and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as Interference Powder, a novel for children. Her company BookTheWriter hosts pop-up book groups in which small gatherings of readers discuss new books with their authors. The Latecomer: A Novel (Celadon Books) follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the siblings – Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally – feel no special familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna decides to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer” play in this fractured family? Korelitz touches on grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics in answering.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel The Nest – which was named one of the best books of 2016 by People, The Washington Post, NPR, Amazon, and others and has been optioned and is in development as a limited series – and her work has been translated into more than 28 languages. In Good Company: A Novel (Ecco), Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than 20 years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring – the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was 5. Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting work to raise Ruby and keep Julian’s small theater company – Good Company – afloat. Moving to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes, a chance to breathe easier, and a reunion with Margot, now a TV star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now?

Dani Shapiro is a bestselling novelist, memoirist, and host of the podcast Family Secrets, now in its sixth season. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time. She has taught at Columbia and New York University and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Signal Fires: A Novel (Knopf) opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of the accident become a secret so dangerous it can never be spoken. But time moves on and when the Shenkmans – a young couple expecting a baby boy – arrive, it’s as if the accident never happened. Then Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son, befriends Ben. He’s now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, and past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen. Signal Fires illuminates the ties that bind families together and the secrets that can break them apart.