What do you do when you are faced with the choice between leaving a life you love or leaving yourself behind? These are the questions that essayist, professor, and mother Kelly McMasters explores in her memoir The Leaving Season, as she details her remarkable journey from being a sophisticated writer in New York City to a rural mom of two in Pennsylvania. It was in this transition that Kelly came to define her unique relationship to motherhood, find liberation in divorce, and discover the beauty that comes with choosing yourself and unapologetic happiness.

Join us for a deeply emotional and powerful conversation, as Kelly and Erin explore themes of love, loss, transformation, motherhood, self-discovery, and freedom, including:

• Breaking free from a life that no longer allows you to be you  
• Raw emotions of motherhood: when you don’t think of yourself as a “natural mother”; the freeing feeling of becoming a single mother after divorce
• The fantasy of marriage and how it masks the reality of what happens when relationships grow apart 
• Complexities of divorce, finding critical distance, and softening anger from past relationships
• Reinvention as a mother and finding empowerment on your own terms
• Dating after divorce: creating a relationship in a way that works best for you and letting go of the fantasy
• What it means to no longer apologize for using your voice 

OUR GUEST: Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of several books including her recent memoir-in-essays The Leaving Season, and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine and The Paris Review. Kelly serves as an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University.

Want more Kelly? Find her online at www.kellymcmasters.com and follow her on:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kelly_mc_masters/ 
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kelly.mcmasters.3 

You can find her books at:

• The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-leaving-season-kelly-mcmasters/1142386744
• Wanting: Women Writing About Desire: https://bookshop.org/p/books/wanting-women-writing-about-desire-margot-kahn/18576719?ean=9781646220113 

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