LIVE- Halle Butler: Jillian w/ Kiley Reid

Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, thirty-five-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.

Megan and Jillian's lives become increasingly precarious as their faulty coping mechanisms--denial, self-help books, alcohol, religion, prescription painkillers, obsessive criticism, alienated boyfriends, and, in Jillian's case, the misguided purchase of a dog--send them spiraling toward their downfalls. Wickedly authentic and brutally funny, Jillian is a subversive portrait of two women trapped in cycles of self-delusion and self-destruction, each more like the other than they would care to admit.

Halle Butler is the author of Jillian and The New Me. She has been named a National Book Award Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.

An Arizona native, Kiley Reid is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her short stories have been featured and are forthcoming in Ploughshares, December, New South, and Lumina, where her short story was the first-place winner in the 2017 Flash Prose Contest. In Summer 2018, she attended the Cuttyhunk Island Residency as the recipient of the Paul Cuffee Scholarship. SUCH A FUN AGE is her first novel, with film and TV rights already acquired by Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions and Sight Unseen Pictures. Kiley lives in Philadelphia.

This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook. Check out the book here.