***Online event - Zoom link will be sent to you on the day of the event***
Cliterature, the Vagina Museum's book club, offers you a generous and satisfying fingering through the feminist pages. We’ll include a mixture of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. Everyone is welcome. Our book club is led by former trustee, Niharika Jain.
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About the book
Karen Havelin's Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is a life told in reverse and a subversion of what we expect from stories of illness. Having been diagnosed with endometriosis in her twenties, we follow Laura Fjellstad in her struggle to live a normal life across New York, Paris and Oslo, fueled by her belief that to survive her chronic illness she must be completely self-reliant. Flowing backwards from 2016 to 1995, we meet Laura's younger selves: her healthier selves.
Laura as a daughter, a figure skater, a lover, and a mother-finally leading a life her own teenage self would be in awe of. To be devoured intensely in one sitting, Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is a remarkable debut novel with bracing emotional insights and piercing descriptions of pain that linger in one's mind long after the last page. It is also a beguiling meditation on relationships, motherhood, sexuality, pain and the limitations of our own bodies.
About the author
Karen Havelin is a writer and translator from Bergen, Norway. She attended Skrivekunst-akademiet i Hordaland, and has a Bachelor’s degree in French, Literature, and Gender Studies from the University of Bergen and University of Paris Sorbonne. She completed her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in May 2013. Her work has been published both in Norwegian and in English. Her first novel, Please Read This Leaflet Carefully was published simultaneously in the US, the UK and Norway in spring 2019, from Dottir Press, Dead Ink Books and Cappelen Damm (norsk tittel Les pakningsvedlegget nøye).
Where to find the book
Buy the book from our online shop or get your hands on a copy via your local independent bookshop or library as a physical book, e-book or audiobook.
As this is a participatory event by nature, not a performance, anyone who doesn't engage - which can via audio, text, or any method accessible to you - will be automatically removed to ensure safety of all participants. Don’t worry if you’ve not finished the book in time for the session, having read some or most of it will help you take part in our discussion.
Live transcription will be enabled on Zoom for all our events. If you need a transcript after the event, please email us at info@vaginamuseum.co.uk to get a copy.
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