Conversations from the Cullman Center: Shame and Love, Secrets and Families

Deborah Cohen, a former Cullman Center fellow and the author of the newly-published Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, talks with Andrew Solomon about shame and families, past and present.

 

Deborah Cohen is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home. Reviewing Cohen’s latest work, Family Secrets, in the Guardian (London), Kathryn Hughes calls it a "book of marvels," and Henry Hitchings in the Financial Times says it combines "scrupulous research with cool analysis and a humane intelligence."

 

Andrew Solomon’s articles on mental health, family, politics, gay rights, and art have appeared in The New Yorker, Art Forum, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Solomon won the 2001 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. His most recent book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, was named one of the best books of 2012 byThe New York Times.