Lisa Braver Moss - Shrug - Facebook LIVE Event
Category: Events Calendar
Date and Time for this Past Event
- Thursday, Jun 4, 2020 7-8pm
Location
Rediscovered Books - Boise
180 N 8th St
Details
Lisa Braver Moss shares the quiet rebellion and silent strife of a Berkeley student.
OAKLAND, California –When you ask most Americans to think about Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, they’ll likely picture flower children calling for peace and anti-war protestors filling the streets. The decade was a turning point in America, a time of radical change. And in the context of her family life, Martha Goldenthal is a radical. But her rebellion isn’t sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll – it’s doing well in school and escaping her battering, academia-hating father and her disturbed mother.
In her unflinching new novel “Shrug” (She Writes Press, Aug. 13, 2019), Lisa Braver Moss gives voice to a private narrative of the 1960s – one that quietly existed, without headlines and threats of tear gas, but still not without turmoil. Moss draws from her own experience as a survivor of childhood domestic violence who came of age in Berkeley during the seismic ’60s to craft the novel’s lead, Martha, a teenager with a nervous tic (a shrug of the shoulder) who is waging a private rebellion while her peers take part in a very public, nationwide movement.
In “Shrug,” Moss delicately navigates the complexities of family abuse through the perspective of a parentified child and her self-blame and need for control. Martha must endure her parents’ hideous divorce, the loss of her father’s record store and livelihood, her mother’s heartless eviction of her from the family home, and an unlikely custody case putting her in her father’s care. Can Martha find her way to a brighter future?
