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I Remember It This Way: A Panel on Memoir

Featuring Julia Lee, Meredith Maran, & Michelle Tea

If it's time to tell your story, sit down with our memoirists to hear about what it takes to craft a narrative out of your own life and memories.

Memoir is more than memory — it’s a radical act of self-definition. Join celebrated authors Julia Lee, Meredith Maran, and Michelle Tea for an honest and wide-ranging conversation on writing personal truth. From navigating vulnerability on the page to challenging dominant narratives around identity, family, and survival, these authors will share insights from their own journeys through memoir. This panel invites writers to consider how telling your story can be both a creative and political act.

This panel will be held in the West Hollywood Library Community Meeting Room. 

Book signing to follow at 3:30 pm in West Hollywood Park. 

Julia Lee is a Korean American writer, scholar, and teacher. Her memoir, Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, was published in 2023 (paperback 2024) and was praised by the New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR’s Morning Edition, and the Boston Globe. She is the author of Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals and The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, as well as the novel, By The Book, which was published under the pen name Julia Sonneborn. She is a professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches Black and Asian American literature. In Spring 2024, she was a Fulbright lecturer in Okinawa, Japan. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. 

Meredith Maran is the queer, septuagenarian, award-winning author of 14 books about how things are versus how they should be. A book critic and contributor to The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Fodor’s Travel, and many other publications, Meredith appears on podcasts and performance stages, and speaks at conferences, festivals, and universities. Her book, MY LIE: A True Story of False Memory, is in development for a television series. She lives in a Los Angeles bungalow that’s even older than she is.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books of memoir, fiction, poetry and children's lit — including her latest, Knocking Myself Up. Her memoir Valencia won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction, even though it was obviously all true. It was also made into a sprawling, feature-length art film using nearly 20 different directors and different Michelles. Her recent-ish essay collection, Against Memoir, was awarded the PEN/America Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the recipient of the legendary Rona Jaffe Awards, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

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