Haystack Book Talk/Movie: An Evening with memoirist & director Susan Seidelman

Date: 09/19/2024
Time: 6:00 pm-7:30 pm

Haystack Book Talks presents a special evening with director Susan Seidelman, the author of Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls, in conversation with Norfolk’s own Mark Erder. The evening will also include a screening of the film Desperately Seeking Susan. Please visit here to register.

The memoir is a funny and insightful first-person story of a trailblazing movie director of the 80s and 90s whose fearless punk drama, Smithereens, became the first American indie film to compete at Cannes, and smash hit Desperately Seeking Susan led to a four-decade career in film. Starting out in the mid-70s, a time when few women were directing movies, Susan was determined to become a filmmaker. She longed to tell stories about the unrepresented characters she wanted to see on screen: unconventional women in unusual circumstances, needing to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-blending films reflect a passion for classic Hollywood storytelling, mixed with a playful New Wave spirit, informed by her years living in downtown NYC.

Seidelman continued to shape American pop culture well into the nineties, directing the pilot of the iconic TV series Sex and The City, focusing her sharp lens on the changing place of women in American society, and helping to fundamentally reshape our self-image in ways that are still felt today. Seidelman not only has a keen perspective on the times she’s lived through — from her Twiggy-obsessed girlhood, through the Women’s Lib movement of the early 70s, the punk scene of the late 70s, Madonna-mania of the 80s, to the dot-com “greed is good” 90s, and beyond—she also tells great stories.