Coffee and Book Club with Susan Swan

Event Details

Event type: All Ages

Coffee and Book Club with special guest Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don't Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space.

Interview with the author led by Rina Barone, director of Stratford Arts & Lectures, followed by audience Q & A, and book signing/meet & greet.

Doors open at 1:00pm with ample time to purchase beverages and food if desired. The Livery Yard regular menu will be in affect. 

There are two ticket options available: general admission and general admission with signed copy of book. We will have copies of Susan's memoir on hand for purchase.

About the author:

Novelist, journalist, activist, teacher, Susan Swan’s impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Her fiction has been published in twenty countries. Her latest book, Big Girls Don’t Cry, A Memoir About Taking Up Space was published simultaneously May 27, 2025, in Canada by HarperCollins and by Beacon Press in the US.

Swan taught creative writing at York University for 25 years as a tenured professor. She was York’s Robarts Scholar for Canadian Studies in 1999-2000 and she is a professor emerita in the Humanities Department.

Her best-known novels are The Biggest Woman in the World about the giantess Anna Swan who exhibited with P.T. Barnum and The Wives of Bath, a gothic tale about a murder in a girls’ boarding school. It was made into the feature film Lost and Delirious starring Mischa Barton, Piper Parebo and Jessica Pare. Swan is the co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which is the largest literary award in the world for women and non-binary American and Canadian fiction authors. She recently received an Order of Canada for her writing and her work on the Shields Prize. Her short story The Oil Man’s Tale won the Gloria Vanderbilt Prize for Fiction in 2019. In June 2014, her first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World was published in Portugal by Tinta da China.

About the book:

“Speaking as a fellow oddball, I think that this is the best book about coming to terms with your differences from the norm (especially for women), that I've read. It's insightful, honest, and adept. Definitely, one of a kind.” — Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley

Where do we belong if we don’t fit in?

A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me

Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences.

In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies.

Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, Big Girls Don’t Cry invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

For more information, please visit our website: www.stratfordartsandlectures.com

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