Event

Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Brown: The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship

Sponsored by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's

Thursday, September 24, 2015
7:30pm

Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025

In today's culture, the bonds of female friendship are not considered unique or extraordinary. But only a few centuries ago, the idea of female friendship was completely unacknowledged, even dismissed. Only men, the reasoning went, had the emotional and intellectual depth to develop and sustain these meaningful relationships.

Surveying history, literature, philosophy, religion, and pop culture, acclaimed author and historian Marilyn Yalom and co-author Theresa Donovan Brown demonstrate how women were able to co-opt the public face of friendship throughout the years. Chronicling shifting attitudes toward friendshipboth female and malethey reveal how the concept of female friendship has been inextricably linked to the larger social and cultural movements that have defined human history.

This is a must-read, revelatory cultural history!

Marilyn Yalom wis a former professor of French and presently a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She is the author of widely acclaimed books such as A History of the Breast, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen, as well as The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds, which includes a portfolio of photographs by her son Reid S. Yalom. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, the psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.

Theresa Donovan Brown is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the UC Berkeley. Her background writing policy-level speeches for global economic leaders, trading securities, and running a financial communications firm inform her insights into the cultural history of friendship.

The event is free - please register today.