Moments of Glad Grace Book Launch & Storytelling performance

Event Details

Event type: All Ages

Show Description
When Alison Wearing tells a story, it's gripping! Join her as she launches her latest book Moments of Glad Grace, a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. This storytelling event with live music is one of the highlights of our spring lineup! Her storytelling performance (adapted from the book by Jennifer Paquette) will be followed by a reception with a book signing, snacks and cash bar. For anyone who knows Alison, a dance party might follow! This event has limited seating so pick up your tickets early!

What can you expect from the event?

• A musical storytelling performance of Moments of Glad Grace
• Reception with snacks and a cash bar
• Book signing and meet & greet with Alison Wearing
• Joy and laughter

About the Book
Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being eighty and in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest ― any at all ― in genealogy.

Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us.

Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace is ultimately a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.

"This is a wise, funny, and tender book, beautifully written and perfectly executed from first to last sentence. It's about a daughter and her ageing father, it's about genealogy and identity, it's about Ireland, but actually it's about how we love the ones we love. Moments of Glad Grace is a travelogue of the heart. It's a road you'll want to travel."
~ Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

About the Author

Alison Wearing is a Canadian writer and performer.

Her book, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter, is both a memoir and a multimedia solo play. The memoir was shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction, nominated for the RBC/Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, and became a national bestseller. The solo play has had more than 100 performances in theatres across Canada and has been featured in festivals from Mexico to Sri Lanka. Its numerous awards include Best Dramatic Script at New York City's United Solo, the largest festival of solo theatre in the world. Alison performs, speaks, and teaches writing workshops internationally.

Event Link: