Diane Johnson & Alan Riding on Lorna Mott Comes Home
An Evenings with an Author featuring Diane Johnson and Alan Riding. (Filmed on 30/03/2022 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.)
A woman far from home in an unhappy marriage takes the matter of homecoming into her own hands. Thus begins celebrated novelist Diane Johnson’s latest book Lorna Mott Comes Home, a witty comedy of manners practically made for expats to enjoy. When Lorna Mott leaves her second husband and his quaint French village for her native San Francisco, she discovers that the home she left behind possesses its own share of problems.
Known for her casts of quirky characters and their domestic dramas, Johnson continues the tradition in Lorna Mott Comes Home. From floundering children to enigmatic grandchildren, Lorna finds herself entangled in increasingly ridiculous spats and situations, all the while trying to navigate a place which has changed significantly since she left for her French séjour. Johnson’s work, while deft and funny, nonetheless contains social and political depth. Living through the financial crisis in a city being ravaged by the invasion of Big Tech, Johnson’s characters are running low on money and, for some, time. The book reads like an anthropological study of the (often poor) decisions made by lost people in a changing world. In this way, Johnson exposes the fiction of the Homecoming, forcing Lorna and readers alike to ask where and how, in today’s world, roots can grow.
About the speakers:
Diane Johnson is a novelist and essayist. Her 1988 work Persian Nights and 1982 work Terrorists and Novels were nominated for Pullitzer Prizes in Fiction and General Nonfiction, respectively. Johnson was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the California Book Award gold medal for fiction for her 1997 book Le Divorce. Johnson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.
Alan Riding is an author and journalist. He has worked for The Financial Times, The Economist, and The New York Times. Riding served as a long-time foreign correspondent for the latter, working first as Paris bureau chief and later as European Cultural Correspondent. His latest book, And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (2011) received the 2011 Spear’s Book Award for Social History of the Year.
Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.