Heather McCalden at Blackwell’s

Fresh from Edinburgh International Book Festival, Heather McCalden is dropping into Manchester to discuss her book with Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Observable Universe.

The Observable Universe blurb describes it as: “A moving, genre-defying memoir of a woman reckoning with the loss of her parents, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world.” It explores grief, loss and the entwined histories of AIDS and the Internet.

Heather McCalden will be in conversation with Dr Valerie O’Riordan, a fiction writer, critic and academic, lecturing in Creative Writing and English at the University of Bolton. In a review for Bookmunch, O’Riordan says: “It’s all fascinating and even within the genre-busting catalogue of Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction line, it subverts readers’ expectations… A startling and meditative exploration of medical history, computer science, and bereavement.”

Now based in New York City, Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image, and movement. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2015 with a Masters in photography and performance, participated in the Tin House Winter 2021 Workshop, and has been awarded residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy. She won the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, an annual competition for unpublished writers, with her proposal for The Observable Universe.

Since being published in spring ths year, The Observable Universe has received praise from William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, while Noreen Masud, author of the critically acclaimed A Flat Place, calls it: “A remarkable book.”

At this event in Blackwell’s Bookshop, Heather McCalden will read from The Observable Universe, her first book, and talk about its themes and her approaches to the writing with Valerie O’Riordan – the book will be available to purchase on the night with the author signing copies after the talk.

A little more from the publisher: When she was a child, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. She was seven when her father died and ten when she lost her mother. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, her personal devastation was mirrored by a city that was ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she begins to research the mysterious parallels between the histories of AIDS and the internet. She questions what it means to ‘go viral’ in an era of explosive biological and virtual contagion and simultaneously finds her own past seeping into her investigation. While connecting her disparate strands of research – images, fragments of scientific thought, musings on Raymond Chandler and late-night Netflix binges – she makes an unexpected discovery about what happened to her family and who her parents might have been. Entwining an intensely personal search with a history of viral culture and an ode to Los Angeles, The Observable Universe is a prismatic account of loss calibrated precisely to our existence in a post-pandemic, post-internet life.