We welcomed Lisa Gornick (The Peacock Feast, Louisa Meets Bear) to The Center for Fiction to discuss Ana Turns, her latest novel. Ana Turns unspools over the twenty-four hours of a woman’s sixtieth birthday, as she grapples with issues from addiction to marital fidelity to family betrayals; the novel contemplates the acute heartaches that come from decades of womanhood, bringing a fresh perspective to the literary stage. Gornick was joined by Joan Silber (Secrets of Happiness) to discuss depicting mature and complex female characters in literature and finding happiness for one’s characters and oneself.
Featured Book
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Ana Turns
By Lisa Gornick
Published by Keylight Books / Ingram Publisher Services
Nine years have passed since Ana Koehl had sex with her pot-addicted anesthesiologist husband, seven since she began an affair with a gonzo journalist. She’s gratified by her work as a book doula, but burdened by her belief that she need always be on call. Her elderly mother’s birthday greeting is an inflation-adjusted calculation of the cost of raising Ana in a mice-infested house, her brother has hijacked the will of their recently deceased starchitect father, her adult child is changing rapidly before her eyes, and her best friend advocates for “the truth in lies.” Gazing out at the dark moat of Central Park from behind her desk, Ana sees that she can no longer postpone making peace with her past or confronting her present.
Narrated by Ana and the key figures in her life—her husband, her brother, her lover’s wife, to name a few—Ana Turns spirals through issues from capital punishment to the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas, culminating in a watershed dinner party, with Ana’s family members’ true colors on full display. By day’s end, the bounds of her own collaboration and forgiveness illuminated, Ana turns towards a vision of what she wants next in this blink of a life.
In conversation
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Lisa Gornick
Lisa Gornick
Lisa Gornick is the author of four previous books, most recently The Peacock Feast and Louisa Meets Bear, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Picador. Her essays have appeared widely, including in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Real Simple, and the Wall Street Journal. A graduate of the Yale clinical psychology program and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia, where she is on the faculty, she was for many years a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She lives in New York City with her family. You can learn about Lisa and her work at lisagornickauthor.com.
Photo Credit: Sigrid Estrada
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Joan Silber
Joan Silber
Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. Her most recent is Secrets of Happiness, listed as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and one of the most anticipated books of the year by Buzzfeed, the Millions, and LitHub. Her novel, Improvement, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her book Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Size of the World was a finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize; and Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She’s also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
