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Arts & Entertainment

Highly Acclaimed Memoirists Visit Sachem Library

Trio of fearless female writers shared their true life tales at a book signing.

Three memoirists spoke at the Sachem Public Library this week about their novels which have underlying themes of womanhood.

The community room was filled with book lovers and aspiring authors thrilled to meet Nancy Bachrach (The Center of the Universe), Alice Eve Cohen (What I thought I knew) and Julie Metz (Perfection), and hear how they were able to extract humor from the catastrophic and derive meaning from the chaotic.  Paperback copies of the books were available for purchase and signing, courtesy of Best Bargain Books in Centereach.

The three women met through Sachem Library's head of community services, Lauren Gilbert when she handpicked them as part of a panel of authors for the Empire State Book Festival in Albany last year where they quickly became fast friends.

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"I'm a big lover of memoirs," said Gilbert. "I picked my favorite books of the year... intensely personal stories of a woman's life, and really well-written and compelling."

The three literary ladies stayed close and decided to take their show on the road in the performance piece, Three Short Women — Three Tall (True) Tales.

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Cohen elucidated to the audience the appeal of teaming up with fellow authors.

"Writing is a solitary act, with countless hours in your writing cave; you don't get out much, and when you do, chances are other writers are hunkered down in their caves," she said. "It's hard to find kindred spirits ... We quickly discovered we have a lot in common." 

For starters they're all short.  At five-foot-three, Cohen is the veritable giant of the petite panel.

Act one was Bachrach as "The Daughter":   In her book The Center of the Universe, she wrote about life with her mother who struggled for decades through the travails of mental illness.  The author's piquant wit immediately took center stage as she began telling her story by informing about the bright side of her erratic upbringing. 

"When people talk about their crazy relatives, I always win," she said.

The former advertising executive shared the particular incident from which the title is derived when she first realized that her eccentric mother was, in fact, "crazy." At 10 years old in 1958, with she and her two younger siblings in the backseat of the family Chevy, her father drove as her mother, Lola, slept with her head in his lap. Suddenly, Lola awoke with a start to declare, "I am the center of the universe," which she insisted, in a fit of grandiosity, was an unquestionable revelation of seismic proportion.

The writing of this book was a powerful antidote for Bachrach to the repressed '50s and '60s when mental illness was most often treated with "silence and shame."

Act two was Metz as "The Wife."  Demure and soft-spoken she prefaced that the title of her book Perfection is a reference to being more concerned with how things look on the outside than how things are on the inside.

Her complicated marriage ended abruptly when her husband collapsed on the kitchen floor, dropping dead out of the blue at age 44, and leaving her with a six-year-old daughter and a life upended.

Six months later the graphic designer and artist discovered illicit emails and journal entries revealing that her deceased husband had been having affairs with several women on both coasts for most of their marriage, the longest and most damaging of which was with the mother of her daughter's best friend. 

"I was to my horror," she said, "the center of a most sordid suburban scandal."

Act three was Cohen as "The Mother."  The author of What I thought I knew wrote the story of a shocking event in her life when at age 44, the unbelievable cause of her misdiagnosed malady was uncovered after an emergency CAT scan, to be a pregnancy six months along.  This was made all the more mind-boggling by the fact that at 30 she had been told she was infertile.  Seven years after what she described as, "a terrifying pregnancy," the playwright and solo theatre artist decided she needed to put the harrowing ordeal down on paper.  "One day I just sat down and started to write ... I use the page to help me figure things out, and come up with new resolutions," she said.

Bachrach also found new insights through the sharing of her story.

"It wasn't just a catharsis; it was an epiphany," she said. "I always thought I was the victim, I realized [my mother] was the victim, I was just collateral damage. "

Metz shared her proudest moment, which occurred after showing her daughter the book before it was published, and afraid of how she might react.

"'You know Mom, it's a real woman's story' I thought wow, I couldn't have said it better."

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