Laurel Braitman, "Between Us and the Sun: Medicine, Family, Mortality, and Memoir"

Dr. Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine.  She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is a Senior TED Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness, (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. Her next book (forthcoming, Simon & Schuster) is about medicine, family and mortality. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at the Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists. Her work and these collaborations have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera and elsewhere. Laurel lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, CA with her dog Cedar, a long-eared mutt who's not at all impressed by her work.

Public Talk

 Between Us and the Sun: Medicine, Family, Mortality and Memoir

 Why are certain people more likely to find meaning in terminal diagnoses or forge identity in the midst of uncertainty and fear? What can we learn from children who have lived with this daily uncertainty or faced down mortality long before many adults in their lives? What role does imagination play in the stories we tell ourselves about surviving the unbearable, for both children and adults? Laurel Braitman, New York Times bestselling author and Writer-in-Residence at the Stanford School of Medicine, will discuss these questions and more in the context of her next book project. A hybrid of memoir and reporting, Between Us and the Sun (Simon and Shuster, forthcoming) is a work of creative nonfiction. Braitman is telling her own story of growing up in a household suffused with terminal illness, alongside the experiences of other children and adolescents coming to terms with parental loss, and her experience working with a group of grieving children in San Francisco. She is also investigating peer-to-peer support groups and childrens’ grief camps, and delves into the history, neuroscience, physiology and psychology of grief in young people to reveal what has worked to alleviate pain and suffering, what hasn’t, and what adults could stand to learn. She will also touch on her collaborations with musicians, visual artists, radio producers and others to communicate with a broad public audience on issues relating to medicine, science, interspecies relationships and storytelling—from stories in development for This American Life to a live-performance in development with the musician Mirah Zeitlyn.