Australian Publication Day, An Editor's Take, Writing About Trauma

What my editor says about my book when I'm not there and a review I wrote for The New York Times

Australian Publication Day

Ghosts was published in Australia today! Here's a Q&A I did for Hachette, Australia. 

Launching tonight at Readings, Carlton. Please share.

Publishers Weekly column with a twist

Many thanks to Publishers Weekly for this column featuring the deeply thoughtful, articulate, and patient, Ben Adams, Executive Editor at Public Affairs, Hachette — and editor of Ghosts of the Orphanage. It's a wonderful idea to get an editor's comments about a new book — the great ones, like Ben, do so much work behind the scenes. Check out, “The Scope of Harm: New True Crime Books” at PW.com

“She was determined to find out what happened,” says Ben Adams, executive editor at PublicAffairs, “and there was just more, and more, and more.” Kenneally’s two previous titles, The First Word and The Invisible History of the Human Race, respectively explored the origins of language and of identity; when Adams asked what united her three books, she explained that they were all answers to questions she was told not to ask. She asked anyway.

Trauma, Truth, Recovery and Repair

It was a privilege to review the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s new book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, for The New York Times Book Review. Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, written thirty years ago, often helped light the way for me when reporting Ghosts of the Orphanage. After reading Truth and Repair, I went back to read Trauma and Recovery. I was struck by the powerful connection between the books, though they were written so many decades apart. Together they are a huge contribution to the world. It’s amazing how much light one hardworking person can create.

Herman introduces truth and repair as the final stages of a recovery process that she first described more than 30 years ago in a book called “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.” Even in 1992, when the book was published, it was hailed as a beacon. In The New York Times, the reviewer Phyllis Chesler’s first sentence was: “This book is one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud.” Time has borne Chesler out. Herman may not have quite the popular reputation of Freud, but in her capacity as an author, as a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and as a founder and innovative treatment provider in the Victims of Violence program at Cambridge Hospital, her influence runs wide and deep.

US schedule

Exciting news about the March 27th virtual event with Books & Books in Miami. It will be a Q&A with James Carroll, former columnist for The Boston Globe and winner of a National Book Award, among many other honors. Carroll’s most recent nonfiction book was the searing, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost its Soul.

And here’s The Concord Insider with details about the March 23rd event at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire.