Join us for an evening with Louise Marburg, who will read from her debut novel, Fancy Meeting You. A conversation with Jody Hobbs Hesler will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Meet Laura Harrigan. Depending on who Laura is talking to, she’s a psychiatrist, a business consultant, or a mother of twin boys at Yale. That last one is a new lie she’s trying on for size. In reality, Laura is middle-aged, childless, “involuntarily unmarried,” and works a job far beneath her capabilities. She is a graduate of Harvard, but as she notes, “Meeting other people’s expectations is something I am famously unable to do.” Most nights, Laura can be found at Baltimore’s least-glamorous dive, The Chicken Box, where the bartender knows when to call her an Uber. At the weekend, she might be hooking up with a care home aide at her elderly father’s birthday party, much to the chagrin of her uptight sister, Nadine.
The story follows Laura in her home in Baltimore and elsewhere through her fiftieth year. Each chapter marks her encounter with a new character—a family member or two, a potential lover, complete strangers–each offering their own brand of wisdom or judgment or wacky opinion. Somehow, through these entanglements, Laura begins to gather bits and pieces of the self-knowledge she is lacking. Most, if not all, coming-of-age stories are about young people, but this is a middle-aged coming-of-age.
About the Author: Louise Marburg is the author of three short story collections, including the award-winning You Have Reached Your Destination. Her work has been published in Story, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and more. She has been a scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a fellow at the Kenyon Writing Workshops. A native of Baltimore, Louise lives in New York City with her husband. Fancy Meeting You is her debut novel.
About the Moderator: Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the novel Without You Here, winner of the 2025 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction, and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. Her words also appear (or will soon) in TriQuarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Swing, The Pinch, Bull, Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Atticus Review, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.
