RESCHEDULED: Siri Hustvedt to visit for lecture, panel

"Memoir vs. Fiction," a program featuring acclaimed author Siri Hustvedt, is scheduled Tuesday, Feb. 22, at Skidmore College.

Free and open to the public, the event gets under way at 8 p.m. in Emerson Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.   The evening will include a lecture by Hustvedt followed by a panel discussion featuring Hustvedt and Skidmore English Department faculty members Robert Boyers, Greg Hrbek, and Melora Wolff.

Light refreshments will be served.  

Hustvedt has written three acclaimed novels: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and What I Loved. She is also the author of several memoirs, including last year's The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves, and a number of books and essays, most notably A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting.

The New York Times Book Review  called the international best seller What I Loved  "superb," and continued, "What I Loved is a rare thing, a page-turner written at full intellectual stretch, serious but witty, large-minded and morally engaged." Publisher's Weekly called it "a gripping, seductive, break-out novel."

Of The Shaking Woman, Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel wrote, "This is an exhilarating and deeply intelligent neurological memoir. Readers of Oliver Sacks will relish this book because Hustvedt displays a similar blend of scientific detachment and warm human intuition. Sensitive and highly attuned to her own processes, she is also an illuminating guide to the dark country of the writing life."

A native of Northfield, Minn., Hustvedt is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of St. Olaf College, where she earned a B.A. degree in history. She later studied English and taught at Columbia University and at Queens College, publishing poetry before turning to fiction. Her first novel The Blindfold was published in 1992 and has been translated into 17 languages.

She then published three more novels : The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, and The Sorrows of an American. Her fifth novel The Summer Without Men is due this year.

According to the author's web site,   "In 2004, she developed a seizure disorder, which is the subject of her book titled The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (hardcover, 2010, Henry Holt and Co.; paperback, 2010, Picador). This neurological memoir is both a personal account of Hustvedt's experience as a patient and an exploration of the ambiguities of diagnosis through the lenses of medical history, neurology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy."

Please contact Boyers atrboyers@skidmore.edufor more information about the event.