Booksmith and The Bindery host Michele Morano for her new collection of essays Like Love. She'll be in conversation with Ryan Van Meter (If You Knew Then What I Know Now).

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

You can order Like Love here – we're offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

Infatuations. Attractions. Unexpected allure. Entanglements steeped in taboo and disruption. In Like Love, Michele Morano takes on the intrigues, strangeness, and lessons of unconsummated romance with humor and imagination.

Like Love poignantly interweaves episodes from adulthood with the backstory of a young family’s turbulent breakup. When Morano was an adolescent in blue-collar Poughkeepsie, New York, her mother left her father for a woman in an era when LGBTQ parents were widely viewed as “unfit.” Through the turmoil, adolescent Morano paid attention, tucking away the stories that were shaping her and guiding her understanding of love.

Turning romantic clichés inside out and challenging us to rethink our notions about what it means to love, Like Love tells hard and necessary truths about the importance of desire in growing, traveling, mourning, parenting, and figuring out who you are in the world. With precision and depth, Morano explores what it means to find ourselves in relationships that are not quite—but almost—like love.

Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women. Born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Michele lives in Chicago, where she chairs the English Department at DePaul University. Author photo by Kyle Brondeson.

Ryan Van Meter is the author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now, as well as other essays published in magazines and selected for anthologies including The Best American Essays. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco. Author photo by Bennett Honson.

Please Note:

> This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

> You can order Like Love here – we're offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.