Author Michelle Herman will read from her new book and will be glad to sign copies. But she will also talk about her job as an advice columnist for Slate and answer any questions you have about that work. Plus, she’ll welcome your family, relationship, and life-in-general questions and will provide “live” advice on the spot. (Bring you kids if you like!  Not only because Michelle really, really likes having kids around at her events—yes, even babies who might cry—but because she’d be glad to answer their burning questions too.)

Michelle took her first-ever ballet class at the age of 62, and it changed her life. If You Say So is a book of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing and loneliness, friendship and community, and family and home—and dance, the dedicated practice of which has led her on an unexpected new path. This is a book about grief and the way it lives in the body—and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

“Funny, self-effacing, heartbreaking, and wise, Herman shows us that life, in all of its choreography and improvisation, really is like ballet: Press down and rise at the same time. Descend and lift.”  —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Good Bones

Michelle Herman has been writing and publishing autobiographical nonfiction for 20 years, alongside the novels and stories she has been writing for even longer. Her nine previous books include the novel Close-Up, which was awarded the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, and Dog, which won praise from the New York Times Book Review and Entertainment Weekly, and the collection of essays Like A Song, which was one of O Magazine’s Ten Titles to Pick Up Now when it was published in 2015, the same year she published A Girl’s Guide to Life, a book of advice for children. She taught creative writing and literature for many years at The Ohio State University, and since 2019 she has been dispensing relationship and family advice every Sunday as a columnist for Slate.