In Conversation: On Writers & Lovers

Kendra Winchester is the co-founder and executive producer of Reading Women, a podcast that features books by or about women. Raised in Appalachian Ohio, she currently reads and writes from coffee shops in South Carolina.

Lily King is the author of the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014 and winner of the Kirkus Prize. In Writers & Lovers (Grove Press) King offers a portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto the determination to live a creative life — something nearly all her old friends have let go of. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. New York Times bestselling author Judy Blue saluted Writers & Lovers as “exactly the book we need now. Witty and heartfelt […] I could not stop reading.”