LIVE- Justin Taylor: Riding with the Ghost w/ Marie-Helene Bertino

When Justin Taylor was thirty, his father, Larry, drove to the top of an airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident would forever transform how Justin thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son.

Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding with the Ghost captures the past’s power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and each other. We see Larry as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling long-term illness and depression. At the same time, Taylor explores how the work of confronting a family member’s story forces a reckoning with your own.

Justin Taylor is the author of the short-story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Sewanee Review, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet (NY Times Editors' Choice), 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas, and Safe as Houses (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has received The O. Henry Prize and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2017 she was the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She teaches at NYU, The New School, and Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, and lives in Brooklyn, where she was the Associate Editor for One Story and Catapult.

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