Reading Groups

The Unlived Life: Novels of Midlife Escape with Jennifer Stock

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3 Sessions Tuesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT July 28 to September 8, 2026

The Center for Fiction

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/28, 8/18, 9/8
In Person at The Center for Fiction

In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels that chronicle midlife escapes centered around transgression. In each novel, a protagonist’s shift to a new setting—to coastal Louisiana, Venice, and the Mojave Desert, respectively—acts as a catalyst for a profound psychological reorientation.

First, we’ll start with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which anatomizes its midlife protagonist’s drift from the customary responsibilities of Victorian motherhood towards a reckoning with her unlived life—her desire for independence and erotic freedom. Then we’ll shift to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which an escape from social duty prompts an increasingly dark erotic obsession. Finally, we’ll consider Claire Vaye Watkins’s feminist remake of the male escape plot, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which a protagonist facing postpartum depression leaves her husband and baby for the Mojave desert to reclaim her creative and erotic registers.

All three novels ask serious questions about the stakes of pursuing an unlived life and explore the ways in which new environments create an expanded palette of possibilities and desires.

Reading List:

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

What to expect from this reading group: This group is seminar-style and participant-driven, with some structure and observations to focus and warm up our conversations.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read The Awakening in its entirety in advance of the first meeting.

We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

Pricing inclusive of sales tax if applicable.

Led by

Jennifer Stock

Jennifer Stock

Jennifer Ives Stock is an essayist whose work has appeared in the Iowa Review, the Yale Review, the New England Review, the Georgia Review, Salmagundi, Hotel Amerika, and the Normal School. Her essays “Alice and Jean,” “Lighter than Air” and “Parrot on a Stone Plinth” were awarded Notable distinctions in The Best American Essays of 2019, 2021, and 2023. Her first essay collection was a finalist for the 2024 Yale Nonfiction Prize. She is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Yale.

About this series

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