Book Talk: Austerity Baby

This talk will be a presentation of and reading from, Janet Wolff’s recently published book, Austerity Baby.

The book is best described as an oblique memoir. It is essentially a family history, but one that is digressive in many ways. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Other stories are told in the course of the narrative include the internment of aliens in Britain in 1940; cultural life in Rochester, New York in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); reflections on the lives and images of spinsters.

There are two hundred colour images in the book (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which will be included in the presentation.