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Book Talk: Marion Winik — First Comes Love: A Memoir

April 11, 2026 6:00pm – 7:00pm
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A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by the longtime All Things Considered commentator charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable.

“Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous—and, above all, fearlessly honest…. ultimately a joyous story.” —Newsday

When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony’s impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.

Marion Winik is heard regularly on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” She was the recipient of a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and has been voted Favorite Local Writer by the readers of the Austin Chronicle for four consecutive years. First Comes Love won the Violet Crown Award for Best Book by an Austen Writer, 1996, from the Austen Writer’s League. The author of Telling, she lives in Austin, Texas, with her two sons.

Winik will be in conversation with Susan Coll, the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore.

This event is free with first-come, first-served seating.

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