I Didn't Know That I Didn't Know You: Author Betty Morningstar in Conversation with Feminist Writer and Activist Jaclyn Friedman

A five-year-old announces she's going to be a ballerina — and that she isn't going to get married. At six, she pictures God as a man made of metal. By nine, she's attempting to read Freud off her parents' bookshelf. What does a child know that she doesn't yet have words for?

In her memoir-in-essays I Didn't Know That I Didn't Know You, Betty Morningstar traces the arc of a life shaped by early intuitions that were set aside, buried, and eventually reclaimed. Growing up Jewish in postwar America in the 1950s and '60s, navigating her brother's death, a family secret, and a world that had little room for the kind of girl she already knew herself to be, Morningstar weaves together the personal and the political — the women's movement, the #MeToo reckoning, the changing landscape of faith — to ask a question that resonates far beyond her own story: what happens when we finally listen to what we always knew?

Join us for a conversation between Betty Morningstar and feminist writer and activist Jaclyn Friedman, whose own Jewish roots and lifelong work on women's voices and the cost of silence make her an ideal interlocutor for this book and the questions it raises.

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Betty Morningstar is a clinical social worker who has served as a psychotherapist, educator and associate chaplain. She holds a Ph.D. from Smith College School for Social Work and a M.A. from Andover Newton Theological School.

Dr. Morningstar's work has been featured in or on The Boston Globe Magazine, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab website at Brandeis University, Columbia University Press and other professional journals.

She lives with her wife in Boston and on Cape Cod.