Kiley Reid presents SUCH A FUN AGE in conversation with Sasha Sagan at Porter Square Books

Kiley Reid discusses and signs her debut Such a Fun Age, in conversation with Sasha Sagan!

A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store’s security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family,” the complicated reality of being a grown up, and the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

Kiley Reid is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her short stories have been featured and are forthcoming in Ploughshares, December, New South, and Lumina, where her short story was the first-place winner in the 2017 Flash Prose Contest. Last summer she attended the Cuttyhunk Island Residency as the recipient of the Paul Cuffee Scholarship. Reid lives in Philadelphia.

Sasha Sagan holds a degree in Dramatic Literature from NYU. She has worked as a TV producer, filmmaker, editor, writer, and speaker in New York, Boston, and London. Her essays and interviews on death, history, and ritual through a secular lens have appeared in New York, O Magazine, Lit Hub, Mashable, The Violet Book, and elsewhere. She regularly speaks on ways science can inform our celebrations and how we mark the passage of time. Her first book is For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World.