Rebecca Mead | Paul Holdengräber

A passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. For Rebecca Mead, that book was George Eliot's Middlemarch, which she first read as a young woman in an English coastal town, and reread regularly throughout her life. In My Life In Middlemarch, the New Yorker writer revisits her own past and Eliot's work in a new way, by leading us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch blends biography, reporting, and memoir, taking the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and bringing them into our world. In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Rebecca Mead comes to LIVE from the NYPL to explore the enduring power of Middlemarch, and how the books we read help us read our own lives. 

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.  She lives in Brooklyn. 

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