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This program is currently closed to online reservations.

To RSVP, please email Sharon Padua, Director of Major and Planned Gifts, at [email protected] with your name, email address, and telephone number.

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The role of the biographer, Virginia Woolf once wrote, is to “admit contradictory versions of the same face.”

This is, in fact, the challenge of both the biographer and the memoirist—constructing a living (or once-living) person on the page, without reducing him or her to a single dimension. This seminar/workshop will address the issues and techniques of biography and memoir—as well as some storytelling methods of literary nonfiction that have been appropriated from fiction.

M.G. Lord is the author of an award-winning concept-driven biography of the movie star Elizabeth Taylor and a cultural history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab that is also a memoir of her difficult rocket engineer father. She will look at the importance of research, and how it can deepen the telling of any life, even one’s own. She will also discuss ethical and legal concerns, including copyright restrictions on unpublished material and the privacy rights of nonpublic figures.

This is a free program that will be held at the Studio City Branch Library. Space is limited, so please respond early. For more information, please contact Sharon Padua, Director of Major and Planned Gifts, at [email protected] or 213.292.6268.

 

Reservation and Wait-list Policy

LFLA Members will receive advance notice to make reservations, before being open to the general public.

Reservations will be taken until the program is full, at which point a waiting list will be maintained. If you or anyone in your party can no longer attend, please inform us ahead of time to the best of your ability so we can keep an accurate reservation count as well as accommodate other guests who wish to attend. If you are on the waiting list and a reserved guest cancels, the Library Foundation will contact you regarding availability.

M.G. Lord

M.G. Lord

M.G. Lord is a cultural critic and investigative journalist. She is the author of the widely praised books Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science, a family memoir about Cold War aerospace culture, and Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. Her most recent book is The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice, which won the L.A. Press Club Award for the best book on an entertainment subject in 2012.

She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and that paper’s Arts & Leisure section, and her work has also appeared in such publications as Travel + Leisure, Discover, Vogue, the Wall Street JournalThe Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. A graduate of Yale, Lord was for twelve years a syndicated political cartoonist and columnist based at Newsday. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at USC.


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