“I realized how much I love Rochester by leaving Rochester,” she says, singling out Mt. She likes to see the Mississippi River and cotton fields while driving around west Tennessee, but the South doesn’t compare to her hometown. There is driftwood and a dish of sea glass on the coffee table, fresh flowers in a mug on a bookcase. “I stay up here pretty much as long as I can during winter break,” she says while relaxing on the couch in her bungalow here, a collection of Nancy Drew mysteries behind her head. When she’s not teaching summer writing workshops in places like Mexico and Ireland, Livingston splits her time between Rochester and Memphis, where she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis. “And there are a lot of themes in the book that people can relate to…I think a good memoir is easily as universal as a good novel.” “The book itself is about Rochester, so it gives people an opportunity to see our community reflected in the eyes of a writer like Sonja,” says Joe Flaherty, the literary center’s executive director.

It seems fitting that this year’s pick features a Rochester native, as Writers & Books celebrates its 35th anniversary. A bus tour of sites from Ghostbread, her first book, and Queen of the Fall - with Livingston along for the ride, giving short readings and talks at every stop - includes a tour and tea at the Susan B. Livingston mines memory and personal experience in this series of personal essays that explore femininity through the lenses of class, Catholicism and pop culture from the late 1980s to early ‘90s in America.Īuthor of only the second memoir in “If All of Rochester Reads the Same Book…” history, following Alison Smith’s Name All the Animals in 2006, Livingston will take part in 18 readings, book signings and appearances over a two-week period that starts Saturday. Praise for Livingston’s work speaks to her “gorgeous prose” and “absolutely unforgettable voice” for sentences like this one, from Queen of the Fall: “Like the olive trees of Lebanon are most stories, thousands of years’ worth of roots fingering the undersides of things.” “The best part of myself comes out in writing,” says the author of Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls and Goddesses, selected by Writers & Books for its 16th annual “If All of Rochester Reads the Same Book…” program.

Sometimes it’s only for 15 minutes, but every morning, Sonja Livingston writes before the world interrupts.

Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston