LongHouse Talks: Christine Coulson's One Woman Show

LongHouse Talks: Novelist Christine Coulson’s One Woman Show

A book talk in conversation with New Yorker editor, Susan Morrison, in collaboration with BookHampton on Saturday, June 29 from 4:00-6:00 pm.

Hailed by NPR as a “modern masterwork” and “one of the most immersive and innovative novels you’ll ever read,” One Woman Show is written almost entirely in museum wall labels. Coulson had been writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 25 years when she had the idea to use The Met’s strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is a bullet of a novel that imagines a privileged twentieth-century woman as an artifact—an object prized, evaluated, collected, and critiqued. With humor and surprising poignancy, Coulson precisely distills each stage of her character’s sprawling life in a groundbreaking book that ultimately questions who really get to tell our stories.

Christine Coulson worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1994-2019. Her debut novel about the museum, Metropolitan Stories, was a national bestseller.

Susan Morrison has been the articles editor of The New Yorker for 27 years. She is the former editor in chief of the New York Observer and an original editor of SPY magazine. Her biography of Lorne Michaels will be published in 2025 by Random House.