Marion Winik with Laura Lippman: FIRST COMES LOVE 30th Birthday Party

When Marion Winik’s FIRST COMES LOVE came out in 1997, it reshaped the landscape of memoir with its bold, heartbreaking and hilarious telling of the trajectory of a marriage. Now, 30 years later, it’s being reissued in a special anniversary edition– with an audiobook!– and we are throwing it a birthday party.

Joined by Laura Lippman, Marion Winik will speak about the book and reflect on its 30 years in the world. We’ll have the new edition on hand (complete with a new introduction from Marion!), as well as the new audiobook available for purchase from Libro.fm, the audiobook provider supporting independent bookstores. And a pop-up bar from Bird in Hand to make it extra festive. Join us!

More about the book: When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1983, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony’s impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, strong enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and only ended because of the death of Tony from AIDS, at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.

In a memoir by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Winik tells a story that is all more powerful for the way in which it defies easy judgments. As it charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable, FIRST COMES LOVE: A Memoir (Vintage Books, 30th Anniversary Edition, Paperback Original, Audiobook Original) reminds us—poignantly indelibly—that every love story is a special case.

Books (and the new audiobook!) will be available at the event.

RSVP here!

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead, First Comes Love, and other books. Her essays have recently been published in Agni and The Hopkins Review. She reviews books for numerous publications and hosts The Weekly Reader podcast on NPR. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore and was a commentator on All Things Considered for 15 years.

Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.