Please note that due to a family emergency, this event has unfortunately been canceled. Please check BOOKSMITH.COM/EVENT for updates on if/when this event will be rescheduled.

Booksmith is thrilled to host Nina St. Pierre for her debut Love Is a Burning Thing, a riveting memoir about a daughter’s investigation into the wirings of her loving, unpredictable mother: a woman who lived her life in pursuit of the divine, and who started two big fires, decades apart. Nina will be joined by bestselling author Manjula Martin. Join us!

About the book

Ten years before Nina was born, her mother lit herself on fire in a dual suicide attempt. During her recovery in the burn-unit, a nurse initiated her into Transcendental Meditation. From that day on, her mother’s pain became intertwined with the pursuit of enlightenment. 

Growing up, Nina longed for a normal life; instead, she and her brother were at the whims of their mother, who chased ascension up and down the state of California, swapping out spiritual practices as often as apartments. When they finally settled at the foot of a mountain—reputed to be cosmic—in Northern California, Nina hoped life would stabilize. But after another fire, and a tragic fallout, she was forced to confront the shadow side of her mother’s mystical narratives. With obsessive dedication, Nina began to knit together the truth that would eventually release her. 

In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina interrogates what happens to those undiagnosed and unseen. This is a transfixing, moving portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that also examines mental health, stigma, poverty, and gender—and the role that spirituality plays within each. Nina’s writing skirts the mystical, untangles it, and ultimately illuminates it with brilliance.

Advance praise for Love Is a Burning Thing

“St. Pierre crafts a vivid, richly textured, harrowing memoir of her bond, both steadfast and delicate, with her mother…St. Pierre emerges with a treatise for thinking about not only mental illness and family trauma, but also the ability of belief to alternately empower, embattle, and release. An exhilarating, heart-rending familial portrait.” – Kirkus, *starred review*

“Love is a Burning Thing is a spectacular, fearless memoir, written with real muscle and voice, guided by an electric eye for truth and compassion. I loved this book.” – Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up

“Nina St. Pierre’s effulgent prose is as fiery as the title itself: unrelenting, strong, and vast. You will be shocked at learning that this is St. Pierre’s debut as she wields such a command on language and narrative with extreme sensitivity towards mental illness, social inequities, and of course, the bond she had with her late mother that you’d believe she were a veteran in the world of arts and letters.” – Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author

“This book is like molten lava rushing down a slope, burning away everything in its path: dangerous and wild and unstoppable, and awe-strikingly beautiful. Love is a Burning Thing is a testament to the life-defining and sometimes life-shattering mother-daughter bond; a free dive into the depths of mysticism and mental illness, and the slippery, disorienting spaces where they overlap; an indictment of systems that leave the most vulnerable to fend for themselves; and a record of a self-determined, wise, embodied creative life rising from ashes—literally.” – Lilly Dancyger, author of Negative Space and the First Love

“Nina St. Pierre’s high-wire act of a memoir brilliantly balances pain, wit, and levity in its two trajectories of searching — the mother’s for enlightenment, for meaning, for salvation, and the narrator’s for answers, empathy, and compassion. St. Pierre tells this story with a warmth and intimacy that makes you want to follow her wherever she goes. Love is a Burning Thing will sear your heart in two and leave you smoldering.” – Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much

“Love Is a Burning Thing is an unflinching portrayal of a mother’s untreated mental illness, its wide-reaching impact, and a daughter’s drive to make sense of it all. Luminous, haunting, as painful as a burn and as beautiful as the flame that caused it, Nina St. Pierre’s love-fueled story broke my heart and opened my eyes. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.” – Gabrielle Korn, author of Yours for the Taking

“I was caught up in this memoir from the very beginning and struggled to put it down, not only for the wrenching story it tells about family history, mental illness, American counterculture, and one woman’s calling, but because of the time we get to spend in a beautiful and sparsely populated part of California that is almost never represented on the page, on screen, or in the popular imagination. This is a profoundly California book, giving us as illuminating a portrait of the rural north state as it does of Nina’s family and her mother’s life–full of love, mystery, and heartbreak. I was blown away by St. Pierre’s beautiful rendering of this complex family story.” – Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

About the author

Nina St. Pierre is a queer essayist and culture writer whose work has appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Gossamer, Nylon, Outside, Columbia Journal, Bitch, Catapult, and more. She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Rutgers-Camden.

Manjula Martin is author of the national bestseller The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was formerly managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in California.

Please note:

• Masks are not required, but can be provided upon request.
• Check-in begins at 6:45. Unclaimed seats are given up beginning at 7:10.
• There will be a 30 minute post-show signing as time allows. Books will be for sale on the night of the event, but you can also purchase additional copies straight from our website.
• Questions? Accessibility requests? Write to us at [email protected].