Wisconsin Book Festival Presents: Jesse Lee Kercheval for French Girl

Wisconsin Book Festival Presents: Jesse Lee Kercheval for French Girl

Central Library

Meeting Rooms 301 and 302 Combined

Wednesday, Sep 11, 2024, 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in seventeen connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic—a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake—as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.

All event details on the Madison Public Library website