Patricia Foster — Author Event
Join us at Page & Palette on Thursday, November 12th at 6PM as award-winning local authors Patricia Foster and Suzanne Hudson discuss Foster’s new memoir, A Marriage in Startled Air.
Patricia will be in conversation with Suzanne Hudson, sharing stories and insights from her beautifully written memoir about marriage and family.
Reserve your copy of A Marriage in Startled Air HERE. The book will be available for pick up anytime after October 15th.
About the Book
A story of marriage, illness, and a hidden past in which the consequences of recovery and the revelations of trauma open a marriage to a new map of intimacy
In A Marriage in Startled Air, Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband’s rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the journey of recovery—and discovery—between two artists in a relatively happy marriage leads to difficult conversations about family, memory, identity, and aging. Within this unburdening, Patricia and David discover a new map of intimacy: Once the illusion of normalcy is broken, what emerges is something sweeter and deeper, as if the broken thing becomes, ironically, the healing thing.
About the Author
Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN Award), Just beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, and a forthcoming memoir, A Marriage in Startled Air. She is the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. She has been awarded a PEN Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a Carl Klaus Teaching Award, a 2024 Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing, and the 2026 Alabama Truman Capote Award for fiction and nonfiction. Foster received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD from Florida State University. She was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for over twenty-five years and has taught in France, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Spain. She was born in Fairhope, Alabama.
About the Moderator
Suzanne Hudson (rps.hudson@gmail.com) is the internationally prize-winning author of three novels, a “fictional-ish memoir,” and three collections of short stories, the first of which was a national finalist for a John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her 2025 collection of fiction and essays, Deep Water, Dark Horizons, commemorated her being named Alabama Truman Capote prize winner. Her work has been widely anthologized. Hudson lives near Fairhope, Alabama, at Waterhole Branch Productions, with her husband, author Joe Formichella.