Cree LeFavour, Middlebury alum and author of Lights On, Rats Out, will read from and discuss her work in Middlebury College’s Abernethy Room, Axinn Center, on Monday, November 5, 4:30 pm. Free and open to the public.
“In Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour writes of her struggles to feel she deserves a place in this world. This is one of the best books I have ever read about the drive for equilibrium and how transformative peace can be both for ourselves and our children.” —Darcey Steinke
Sponsored by the Department of English and American Literatures and New England Review.
About the Book: Lights On, Rats Outfocuses on the time when, as a young college graduate, she began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm. Her body became a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame.
In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. We see the world as the author did—turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl—whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing—comes to be the only bright spot in her days. Moving deftly between the dialogue and observations from psychiatric records and elegant, incisive reflection on youth and early adulthood, Lights On, Rats Out illuminates a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.
About the Author: A writer and academic with a B.A. from Middlebury College (1988) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from NYU, Cree LeFavour is also the author of several cookbooks, including Pork (2014), James Beard Award–Nominated Fish (2013), Poulet (2012), and The New Steak (2008). Her recent book, Chelsea Market Makers (2016), is a collaborative effort with Michael Philips. She has also ghost-written books and proposals for chefs and artists and has published essays on topics such as Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, Bon Appetit, and O, The Oprah Magazine.