Join us for the virtual book launch celebrating Responsible Adults by Patricia McNair. For this event, Patricia will be in conversation with Eric May.
“Responsible Adults is devastating, in the best possible way. McNair guides us through domestic worlds where we might fear to tread alone, revealing truths and exposing worlds peopled with want, kitchens with empty refrigerators and strange men. Children eat grape jelly with a spoon and long for ordinary lives as they negotiate adult problems as best they can. Readers are wiser and more compassionate for knowing these stories.” —BONNIE JO CAMPBELL, author, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, Once Upon A River, and American Salvage (National Book Award finalist)
In Responsible Adults, farms fail, families break apart, and work is hard to come by. The characters in Patricia Ann McNair’s fictional Midwestern towns are fueled by grief and hope, loss and desire. A stepfather attacks a neighbor boy for exposing a shameful secret to his stepdaughter. A pregnant, undocumented young woman brings new life to a failing church. A mother uses her reluctant adolescent daughter as a model for her art photography. What happens when responsible adults are anything but responsible people? When they are at best, irresponsible, and at worst, dangerous?
Patricia Ann McNair has managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and now teaches in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of the award winning collection The Temple of Air and the essay collection, And These Are the Good Times.
Eric Charles May is the author of the novel Bedrock Faith. A former reporter for The Washington Post, he's an associate professor in the fiction writing program at Columbia College Chicago.
