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Linda Carroll and Ann Fessler in Conversation

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City Arts & Lectures

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

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. Forum is one of KQED’s most-popular shows and the nation’s most-listened-to locally produced public radio talk show. 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 Television, KRON television, and NPR, and did news commentary for KTVU television. He has also served as host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Since 1970, he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and has taught at Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest and Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, coauthor of the textbook Sound Ideas, and creator of the DVD presentation “Masterpieces of Short Fiction.” He is a widely published scholar and literary critic, a fiction writer, and a guest and frequent interviewer on the City Arts & Lectures stage. He has worked widely as a facilitator and host in the corporate sector and as moderator for a host of major nonprofit events. Dr. Krasny has interviewed many of the leading newsmakers and cultural icons of our time, including former President Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Rodham Clinton, Francis Ford Coppola, Don DeLillo, Newt Gingrich, Vice President Al Gore, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, President Barack Obama, Rosa Parks, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Redford, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, John Updike, and countless others.

Chapters

: Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

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01.: Birth Mother Fantasies

02 min 33 sec

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02.: Catalyst for Linda Carroll

01 min 57 sec

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03.: Catalyst for Ann Fessler

04 min 52 sec

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04.: The Search for Paula

02 min 35 sec

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05.: Misinformation

01 min 46 sec

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06.: Fessler: Contacting Birth Mother

04 min 50 sec

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07.: Adoptive Family

02 min 20 sec

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08.: Carroll: Contacting Birth Mother

03 min 10 sec

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09.: Decision to Adopt

01 min 26 sec

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10.: Fessler's Adoption Research

04 min 26 sec

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: Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

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Linda Carroll on the Catalyst to Search for Her Mother

03 min 36 sec

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Linda Carroll, mother of Courtney Love and unbeknown daughter of Paula Fox, describes the catalyst behind searching out her birth mother.
Linda Carroll on Contacting Paula Fox

03 min 33 sec

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Linda Carroll, mother of Courtney Love and unbeknown daughter of Paula Fox, recalls the experience of contacting her famous mother for the first time.
Ann Fessler's Adoption Research

04 min 54 sec

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Author and video installation artist Ann Fessler expands on her research of mothers who gave children up for adoption, specifically between the years of 1945 and 1973.
Watch Full Program

30 min 12 sec

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