Macmillan executive v-p Will Schwalbe, who also happens to be a bestselling author, is also a prominent podcast host. He brought the popular podcast But That's Another Story, to the Javits Center on Thursday morning. Schwalbe moderated a panel featuring three authors with forthcoming titles: Stephen Chbosky, author of Imaginary Friend (Grand Central), Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy (Liveright), and Aarti Shahani, author of Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares (Celadon).
Schwalbe recorded their lively exchange for the next episode of his show, which is organized around authors talking about a book (or books) that changed their lives. Chbosky, best known for his 1999 bestselling high school coming of age novel, The Perks of Being Wallflower, cited both horror films and TV ("My parents would let me watch anything”) as well as Stephen King's classic The Stand. "I couldn't stop reading it for four days. I didn't even go to work. It made me realize how a book can make you feel."
Shahani, an NPR correspondent, whose memoir is about her family's immigration to America from India, cited Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, the story of Nigerian woman and academic living in America. "The protagonist of the book is looking to find her voice," Shahani said, describing how she read the book at time when she was also searching for her Identity. "I felt stronger reading her book."
Dennis-Benn, whose 2017 novel Here Comes the Sun, won the Lambda Literary Prize, cited Audre Lorde's 1982 autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and identified with Lorde as a West Indian immigrant, a black woman and as a lesbian. "I was taught to respect shame rather than my own voice, which is the opposite of being a writer. I was coming out as a lesbian and I grew up in Jamaica where being a lesbian was taboo," Dennis-Benn said. "Lorde was open about her sexuality and that affected me profoundly."
