Liz Scott in conversation with Rene Denfeld

We are thrilled to welcome Liz Scott and Rene Denefeld to the store at 7 pm on Monday, April 29th.

In her memoir This Never Happened, Liz Scott goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. She mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined.“This is where I live — somewhere smack between pity and rage, between empathy and indictment. And as hard as I look, I still can’t find a place between mercy and pain.” Scott has creatively assembled the text, including bulleted and numbered lists, correspondence, and photographs, which together tell Scott’s family history from as many angles as possible. In the end, the book is about the struggle to clear away pain to make room for compassion, and the challenge of making peace with questions that will never be answered.

Rene Denfeld describes This Never Happened as “Spare, elegiac,” adding “this is a mournful yet reassuring memoir of a family’s dissolution in the wake of a narcissistic mother and a father’s abandonment. Written with warmth and humor, bringing light to even the saddest darkness. This memoir is destined to be a classic.” Liz Scott lives in Portland, where she is a clinical psychologist in private practice by day and a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Rene Denfeld also lives in Portland, where she is a death row investigator and the author of two novels, The Enchanted and The Child Finder. Her third novel, The Butterfly Girl, will be published this fall.