Book Release: Girlish – Lara Lillibridge & Friends

Friday, April 6 @ 7:00pm

We’re excited to host the book release event for Lara Lillibridge’s Girlish: Growing up in a Lesbian Home. Joining her are authors Ken Schneck and Bernard E. P. Harris.

About Girlish:

Lara Lillibridge grew up with two moms—an experience that shaped and scarred her at the same time. Told from the perspective of “Girl,” Lillibridge’s memoir is the no-holds-barred account of childhood in an unconventional household. Personally less concerned with her mother’s sexuality and more with how she fits into a world both disturbed and obsessed with it, Girl finds that, in other people’s eyes, “The most interesting thing about me is not about me at all; it is about my parents.”

In the early years, Girl’s feminist mother reluctantly allows her to play with her favorite Barbies while her stepmother refuses to comfort her when she wakes up from nightmares. She swims naked with her lesbian mother and stepmother in upstate New York. Girl and her brother travel four thousand miles—unaccompanied—to visit their father in rural Alaska, where they sleep in a locked cabin without running water, telephone, or electricity. Raised to be a free spirit by norm-defying parents, Girl has to define her own boundaries as she tries to fit into heteronormative suburban life, all while navigating her mother’s expectations, her stepmother’s mental illness, and her father’s serial divorces.

LARA LILLIBRIDGE sings off-beat and dances off-key whenever her children give her the opportunity. She grew up flying between her two moms in Rochester, New York, and her father in Anchorage, Alaska. Surprisingly, she did not amass a lifetime supply of frequent flier miles from the experience. She is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. In 2016 Lara won Slippery Elm Literary Journal’s Prose Contest, and The American Literary Review’s Contest in Nonfiction. She has had essays published in Polychrome Ink, Hippocampus Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, Luna Luna, Huffington Post, ROAR, and The Feminist Wire. Girlish is her first book.

KEN SCHNECK, PhD, is the author of “Seriously…What Am I Doing Here? The Adventures of a Wondering and Wandering Gay Jew” and the former producer/host of This Show Is So Gay, the long-running, award-winning radio show/podcast. In his spare time, he is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Leadership in Higher Education Program at Baldwin Wallace University where he teaches courses on anti-racism, ethical leadership, and how individuals can work with communities to create a more engaged and just world. You can find him telling stories in and around Cleveland, Ohio.

BERNARD E. P. HARRIS, an aspiring Cleveland writer who grew up in the city’s east side suburbs, but spent most weekends at his abuela’s house in the once-heavily Puerto Rican neighborhood of Ohio City/Detroit-Shoreway where he now lives.  Bernard fills his free time with daydreaming about writing then promptly avoiding it at all costs.  He nerds out over most subjects and holds many opinions about many topics. You will hear them all, just wait.