Sarah Yahm with Joanna Rakoff: Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation

Following a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation combines the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief in a stunning tale for fans of Allegra Goodman and Rebecca Makkai.

The night after fleeing her mother's funeral, cellist Louise Rackoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease—the same one responsible for her mother's slow, agonizing passing.
Determined to spare Leon and their daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. Her disappearance forces the Rosenbergs to grapple with how to find meaning in the face of mortality—a manic and mystical quest that sends them careening across the globe, colliding into tattoo artists, Chasidic Jews, playworkers, and witches. And finally, back into each other.
Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm's own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.

Sarah Yahm has worked as an educator, oral historian, documentarian, and writer. She has a Master’s degree in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz and in Public Humanities from Brown University. She taught at UC Santa Cruz and Brown University. She has published in Slate, The Bellevue Literary Review, and placed pieces on NPR and affiliates, among others. In her work as a writer and an academic, she’s focused on the lived experience and social meaning of illness and disability. She lives in Montpelier, VT.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the bestselling novel A Fortunate Age. Rakoff’s books have been translated into twenty languages, and the film adaptation of My Salinger Year opened in theaters worldwide in 2021 and is now streaming. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Authors’ Guild, PEN and more and has taught at Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Aspen Words. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Elle, and elsewhere, and her new memoir, The Fifth Passenger, is forthcoming.

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EVENT ACCESSIBILITY

This event will take place at street level. If possible, the event will be livestreamed to YouTube. ASL interpretation may be provided (based on the availability of interpreters) but must be requested at least 2 weeks in advance of the event. Seats are limited. Please email us at dGlja2V0aW5nIHwgYnJvb2tsaW5lYm9va3NtaXRoICEgY29t as soon as possible if you require ASL interpretation, guaranteed seating, or other accommodations. We will do our best to serve your needs!

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