Deep Water Festival, NY

On Becoming
Susan Choi, Douglas Stuart, Geoff Dyer
Lauded novelist Susan Choi’s new Flashlight (2025) explores a girl’s confrontation with loss and memory after her father’s sudden disappearance revealing how childhood trauma can splinter a family. Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart portrays adolescence in working-class Glasgow in his acclaimed novels Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, while critic and writer Geoff Dyer adds a non-fiction perspective with Homework, reflecting on his own coming-of-age in 1960s–70s England during a time of post-war upheaval and rapid social change. Together, these three writers will discuss the fragile yet resilient nature of people navigating fractured worlds. From intimate family struggles in suburban America and inner-city Glasgow to the societal upheavals of post-war England, each author’s work illuminates how memory and adversity shape their protagonists’ identities. This panel will bridge continents and decades as Choi, Stuart, and Dyer explore how memory, family, and social environments indelibly shape a person, and how even in the most fractured of worlds, people find the resilience to survive and forge their own identity.

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