Book Club

Join us on Thursday, April 4, at 6:30 pm, with the author Christina Milletti to discuss her book Choke Box.

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About the Book

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective "counter-memoir" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting―and occasionally celebrating―her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive―if they don't kill us first.

About the Author

Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2019. Her fiction and articles have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Harcourt's Best New American Voices, the Iowa Review, The Master's Review: Best Emerging Writers, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Studies in the Novel, and Fiction’s Present: Situating Narrative Innovation (among other places). Her first book, The Religious & Other Fiction (a collection of stories), was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and she has recently completed a new collection, Now You See Her, with the help of a fellowship from UB’s Humanities Institute and a residency at the Marble House Project. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and co-curates the Exhibit X Fiction Series.