Book Signing: Reading Jane with Susannah Kennedy!

We’re thrilled to be a part of this eastern leg of Susannah’s tour – come join in the fun and enjoy refreshments and some stimulating conversation. The book will be available to be signed by the author that day!

Reading Jane: A Daughter’s Memoir and the book tour “Surviving the Narcissistic Mother”

As the estimation of narcissism and its impact on children grows, more people are identifying as the children of such an upbringing. They have been raised by a parent whose sense of self-importance overshadowed the child, the child existing rather as an extension of a parental self that lacks empathy and often exploits their child. It’s estimated that nearly 60 million people are damaged by such relational patterns. Children of such parents are vulnerable to poor self-esteem, lack of boundaries, and co-dependence.

Having emerged on the other side of this phenomenon, Susannah Kennedy, author of Reading Jane: A Daughter’s Memoir has launched her book tour along the East Coast. The tour includes a stop at Main Street Reads in Summerville!, where she’ll sign copies as well as address her path to healing. It wasn’t an easy one, and might not have been achieved at all had Susannah’s mother not inexplicably taken her own life at age 75. When Susannah discovered 45 years of Jane’s diaries, she had a portal into the narrative her mother created and lived.

Susannah avoided plunging in for three years, until she was driven to do so, to understand finally the mystery her mother presented. What emerges is Susannah’s own story in contrast to her mother’s, and ultimately leads her to finally shake off the constraints set by Jane’s need to control both the narrative and her daughter.

Previous events on the West Coast leg of the tour have demonstrated that Susannah is not alone. Nearly 5 percent or 1 in 200 people suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and the sons and daughters are showing up at book events — to take from Susannah’s story of healing the hope they might finally understand and heal their own.

The Reading Jane: Surviving the Narcissistic Mother Eastern Seaboard Tour will encompass 12 cities in October and November 2023: Boston and Gloucester, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; Owego and Woodstock, New York; Washington D.C.; Montrose and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Charlotte, North Carolina; Hilton Head Island and Summerville, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. For details on dates, times, and locations, please visit www.sibyllinepress.com or www.susannahkennedy.com. Main Street Reads at 115 S. Main Street in Summerville will host Susannah on November 19^th from 1-3 p.m.

About the author: Berkeley and Oxford-educated anthropologist Susannah Kennedy was born in India and raised in the United States. Later, she traveled extensively on her own, first in Italy, and then through the Middle East and India, settling for two years in Egypt before becoming a reporter in Dallas, Texas. At Oxford University, she specialized in Arab culture and politics, receiving her DPhil in social anthropology. She and her psychoanalyst husband lived and worked in Germany, raising three children in a thatched-roof farmhouse in the countryside outside Hamburg. Her mother’s suicide and its aftermath brought them back to California in 2017. They now reside in Marin County.