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The 2006 season premiere celebrates the complex lives of women. First, from an evening presented by the Westport Playhouse and The Westport Arts Center, a delicious reading of a delicious story. Tony Award winner Kathleen Chalfont reads Alice McDermott’s “Enough,” a tale, as host Isaiah puts it, “about a woman who wants more food, more cuddling—more of life.” And we hear a little about the story from the author herself in a brief interview. Events, she comments, are less important than our retelling of them, over and over, from various perspectives, over time. Alice McDermott's first novel, A Bigamists' Daughter (1982), was published to wide acclaim. That Night (1987), her second novel, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Charming Billy (1998), won the National Book Award. Her most recent book, After This: A Novel, was published in September 2006. Kathleen Chalfont is a Tony Award winner and nominee for her roles in Wit and Angels in America, and a regular SELECTED SHORTS reader of a wide range of tales spanning three centuries.

A special evening at our home theatre, Symphony Space, celebrating the women authors of Random House, was hosted by the publisher’s latest literary lion, the actress Jane Fonda, whose autobiography My Life So Far placed her on the bestseller lists. From this book, she read an affecting section about working with her emotionally reticent father, Henry and feisty legend Katherine Hepburn on the set of On Golden Pond.

Alice McDermott, “Enough,” read by Kathleen Chalfont
Jane Fonda, “My Life So Far,” excerpt, read by the author.