Rebecca Wait Reads from I’m Sorry You Feel That Way

Damian Barr’s Literary Salon tempts the world’s best writers to read exclusively from their latest greatest works and share their own personal stories. Star guests include Jojo Moyes, John Waters, Yaa Gyasi, Mary Beard, Diana Athill and Louis de Bernières—all in front of a live audience at leading glamorous locations world-wide. Our London home is the Savoy. Suave salonnière Damian Barr is your host.

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We’re back with a deliciously sharp-witted book to share with you. Rebecca Wait is best known for her gripping novel Our Fathers which was a Guardian Book of the Year. Now she shares a reading with us from her new bestseller in the making, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, about dysfunctional family dynamics between twin sisters Alice and Hanna and their mother Celia.

For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide and conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything.

As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they’d intended. They must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.

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This podcast is edited and produced by Megan Bay Dorman, and programmed by Matt Casbourne.