What is the future for memoir in the digital age? Kids are replacing parents as the true family archivists, posting photos, drawings, diaries, and video: the narratives of the young are dominating those of the rest of the family online everyday.

As more people tell their own stories through Facebook, YouTube and other social media, is the memoir an obsolete medium? Can “e-memoirs” mark a rebirth of the form? What does this new kind of personal storytelling mean for how families are conceived and our histories remembered? Is the digital space not the end of memory, but the end of forgetting? The Atavist is bringing together two of its own memoirists, Cris Beam and David Dobbs, along with New York Times Magazine and Wired contributor Clive Thompson, for a night of discussion and drinks, moderated by Alissa Quart, senior editor of The Atavist.

Featuring:

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired  magazine. Thompson also writes for Fast Company and Wired magazine’s website. He’s writing a book on how technology affects our thinking.

Cris Beam is an author and professor in New York City. She is the author of the young adult novel I Am J, as well as Transparent, a nonfiction book that covers seven years in the lives of four transgender teenagers. She is currently at work on a book about the foster-care system. In Mother, Stranger, a new memoir published by The Atavist, Beam writes of how she left her mother’s home at age 14, forced out by mental illness and abuse. More than twenty years later, she learned of her mother’s death, and took up a search for the secret to her mother’s madness.

David Dobbs writes features and essays for publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, the Guardian. He is writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the genetics of temperament—and the idea that the genes underlying some of our most troublesome traits and behaviors also generate some of our greatest strengths and accomplishments. In My Mother’s Lover, his heavily reported, best-selling memoir for The Atavist, David Dobbs delves into his mother’s past before his birth, and the great love she lost during World War II.

Presented in collaboration with The New America Foundation

The Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone and the subject of the recent story in The Atavist by the same name, was one man’s attempt to create an oasis in the heart of a conflict. In a place where even beer runs were a matter of life and death, the proprietors struggled against the entropy of war to find a respite from the world outside. How do writers, photographers, and outsiders thrown into a conflict zone both survive and represent the strange, dangerous, and even comical aspects of life outside of the heat of battle? What role does humor play in defending their psyches against the terrors around them?

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FEATURING

JAMES

Founder of the Baghdad Country Club

JOSHUAH BEARMAN

Author of Baghdad Country Club
Regular contributor to This American Life, Wired, and Rolling Stone

ROBERT NICKELSBERG

A TIME magazine contract photographer for 25 years who has worked in Kashmir, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, among many other places