AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life

Join us for a special book launch at Mechanics' Hall on May 8 at 7pm featuring Jennifer Lunden, author of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life.

Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, will be in conversation with Jennifer Lunden to celebrate the launch of AMERICAN BREAKDOWN: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life.

When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill shortly after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed. The doctor she went to for help told her she was “just depressed.” This wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves Lunden's quest to understand the source of her own enigmatic illness with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

 Jennifer Lunden is a published author, poet, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and former therapist. She is the recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction. Lunden, a dual   citizen, has also been awarded two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and one from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts,   Hewnoaks Artist Residency, and the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France. An engaging speaker and storyteller, Lunden has presented at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, the University of New England, and the KGB Bar Reading Series in   New York, among others, and delights in joining college classrooms as an online guest to discuss her work.

 Chelsea Conaboy is a health and science journalist. Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood is her first book. She lives in a 1920s bungalow near the ocean in Maine, where she gardens poorly and serves as a board member of the Maine   Writers and Publishers Alliance.

This book launch is happening a day before the official release, which means guests will be able to gain access to the book a day before anyone else!

For the protection of the author and others with pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable to long Covid or death, this will be a masked event. (But masks may be removed to eat and drink.)

This is a free event, but you can RSVP to the event here!