At 2 p.m. today, the Toadstool Bookshops in Keene, Peterborough and Nashua will host author Julia Munemo as she presents her memoir, The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy in a free online Zoom event.

In a memoir that’s equal parts love story, investigation and racial reckoning, Julia Munemo unravels and interrogates her whiteness, a shocking secret, and her family’s history. When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she – a white woman – had been married to a black man for six years and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn,” she hid the books from herself, and from her growing mixed-race family, for more than a decade. But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country. Julia will be talking about the lessons she has learned and the work she has done to unpack her whiteness and family legacy and will answer questions from attendees.

Julia McKenzie Munemo went to Bard College before earning a master’s in education at Harvard. After building a career as a freelance writer, she earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. An excerpt from The Book Keeper won the 2016 Bridging the Gap Competition for nonfiction at the Slice Literary Writers’ Conference. She was a fellow at the Williams College Oakley Center for Humanities, was selected as the nonfiction reader for the Stonecoast MFA Alumni Reunion in 2017, and was the Stonecoast alumni teaching assistant in 2018. She works as a freelance writer and editor and teaches courses in creative nonfiction.

The link for this Zoom event can be found on the events page at www.toadbooks.com/event/bookkeeper. For more information, call the Toadstool Bookshop in Keene at 603-352-8815. This book is available for purchase in store at the Toadstool Bookshops or at www.toadbooks.com.

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