Linda Carroll and Ann Fessler in Conversation

City Arts & Lectures





MORE >>

Post to

Likes

Dislikes

RATE

4,194 Views

Info
Bio
Chapters
Highlights
Transcript
Download
More

Partner:: City Arts & Lectures
Location:: City Arts & Lectures
San Francisco, CA
Event Date:: 04.16.08
Speakers:: Linda Carroll,; Ann Fessler,; Michael Krasny
Tags:

Summary: Writer and psychologist Linda Carroll was adopted at birth and raised in San Francisco. When her estranged eldest daughter Courtney Love became pregnant, Carroll decided to seek out her biological mother, who she later discovered was the writer Paula Fox.

Her story of self-discovery as an adopted daughter and the mother of a famously volatile musician is told in Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love.

Ann Fessler was nearly fifty-six when she first met her biological mother. By that time, she had collected over 100 oral histories for her book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Demonstrating how good intentions can produce devastating outcomes, The Girls Who Went Away considers the legacy of shame and guilt suffered by mothers who returned to their "normal lives" after being separated from their infants.

Fessler's intimate study gives voice to those young single American women told to put their pasts behind them and move on; as one subject confessed, "It's as if I was the unwilling accomplice in the kidnapping of my own child" - City Arts & Lectures

Bio

Linda Carroll

Linda Carroll was adopted at birth, raised in San Francisco and only later discovered that her biological mother is the writer Paula Fox. Married at eighteen, and twice more before she was thirty, she is now the mother of five grown children, including singer/songwriter Courtney Love. She is a therapist and writer and lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her husband of seventeen years.

Ann Fessler

Ann Fessler is professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in video-installation art. She won a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, for 2004, to complete her extensive research for this book.

She is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the LEF Foundation, Boston; the Rhode Island Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; Art Matters, New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. An adoptee herself, she begins and ends the book with the story of her own successful quest to find her birth mother.

Michael Krasny

Michael Krasny, Ph.D., is host of KQED's award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business and technology.

Before coming to KQED Public Radio in 1993, Dr. Krasny hosted a night-time talk program for KGO Radio and co-anchored the weekly KGO television show Nightfocus. He hosted Bay TV's Take Issue, a nightly news analysis show, programs for KQED Public Televison, KRON television and National Public Radio, and did news commentary for KTVU television.

Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a widely published scholar and critic as well as a former regular contributor to Mother Jones magazine and a fiction writer. He has also worked widely as a facilitator and host in the corporate sector and as moderator for a host of major non-profit events.

Dr. Krasny received his B.A. (Cum Laude) and M.A. degrees from Ohio University, where he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and his Ph.D. degree from The University of Wisconsin.

Chapters

: Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

Add to Profile
01.: Birth Mother Fantasies

02 min 33 sec

Add to Profile
02.: Catalyst for Linda Carroll

01 min 57 sec

Add to Profile
03.: Catalyst for Ann Fessler

04 min 52 sec

Add to Profile
04.: The Search for Paula

02 min 35 sec

Add to Profile
05.: Misinformation

01 min 46 sec

Add to Profile
06.: Fessler: Contacting Birth Mother

04 min 50 sec

Add to Profile
07.: Adoptive Family

02 min 20 sec

Add to Profile
08.: Carroll: Contacting Birth Mother

03 min 10 sec

Add to Profile
09.: Decision to Adopt

01 min 26 sec

Add to Profile
10.: Fessler's Adoption Research

04 min 26 sec

Add to Profile
: Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

Add to Profile

Linda Carroll on the Catalyst to Search for Her Mother

03 min 36 sec

Add to Profile
Linda Carroll on Contacting Paula Fox

03 min 33 sec

Add to Profile
Ann Fessler's Adoption Research

04 min 54 sec

Add to Profile
Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

Add to Profile