
Samantha Rose in Conversation with Susannah Kennedy at Bird & Beckett Books
Bird & Beckett Books hosts Bay Area author, Samantha Rose, for a talk and signing of her new memoir: Giving Up the Ghost. She’ll be joined in conversation with fellow Sibylline author, Susannah Kennedy, author of Reading Jane: A Daughter’s Memoir.
Books will be available to purchase at the event. For more information, please visit their site here.
EVENT LOCATION
Bird & Beckett Books
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
About Giving Up the Ghost:
Samantha Rose, a New York Times best-selling ghostwriter, steps out of the shadows to unravel the mystery surrounding her mother’s suicide. What begins as a solitary journey of grief shifts form when her mother emerges from the darkness beyond to reconcile her irreversible choice. Raw, resilient, and with surprising humor, Giving Up the Ghost explores the layered complexity of mental health, the love between mothers and daughters and how, in the aftermath of inconceivable loss, we can release our inner ghosts and write a new story for ourselves.
About Samantha Rose:
Samantha Rose is an Emmy-award winning television writer and author of The Package Deal: My (not-so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom that premiered on the San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller List. Additionally, she’s a New York Times and internationally bestselling ghostwriter who collaborates with celebrities, experts, entrepreneurs and industry leaders who represent a wide category of titles, including some that have been selected as Reese’s Book Club Picks and excerpted in the WSJ, Time.com and Harper’s Bazaar. She is the principal of YellowSkyMedia, a boutique editorial agency in Petaluma, California, where she lives with her son.
About Reading Jane: A Memoir
A gripping memoir that shows what freedom looks like when we choose to examine the uncomfortable past
Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protégé, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother’s narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself.
But then Jane at 75, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of 45 years of hidden diaries. Daring to “read” Jane after her death is like unlatching Pandora’s Box. For a year, Susannah twists and turns to the truths she uncovers, comparing what she remembers with what her mother put down in words. This process, accompanied by strange physical symptoms—memories awakening in the body—forces an understanding, allowing Susannah to calm herself and work through each of them, finding ultimately that truth wins out. As Susannah Kennedy re-lives her life through her mother’s eyes, she grapples with the ties between mothers and daughters and the choices parents make.
About Susannah Kennedy:
Susannah Kennedy is the author of Reading Jane: A Daughter’s Memoir. A Berkeley and Oxford-educated anthropologist, Susannah Kennedy was born in India and raised in the United States. Later, she traveled extensively on her own, first in Italy, and then through the Middle East and India, settling for two years in Egypt before becoming a reporter in Dallas, Texas. At Oxford University, she specialized in Arab culture and politics, receiving her DPhil in social anthropology. She and her psychoanalyst husband lived and worked in Germany, raising three children in a thatched-roof farmhouse in the countryside outside Hamburg. Her mother’s suicide and its aftermath brought them back to Santa Cruz, California in 2017. They now reside in Marin County.
