Marita Golden and Nicole Dennis-Benn talk about love and loss at the Brooklyn Book Festival

September 18, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

That's Nicole Dennis-Benn holding the microphone with (left to right) authors Rumaan Alam and Marita Golden and moderator Molly Rose Quinn at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

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How do you survive when your beloved husband is stricken with Alzheimer’s disease at age 68 — and then he decides he loves another woman?

That’s Diane Tate’s devastating predicament in Marita Golden’s novel “The Wide Circumference of Love.”

Diane must grapple with the question, “Who am I now that you don’t remember me?” Golden said Sunday at a Brooklyn Book Festival panel called “All About Me (and Sometimes You).”

Another panelist, Nicole Dennis-Benn, wrote a moving novel about working-class women in Jamaica — where she was born and raised — called “Here Comes the Sun.”
One of this novel’s main characters, Margot, sets up a network of sex workers at the resort hotel where she’s employed. And she has sex with male hotel guests for money although she has passionate longings for a woman who has come back home after living in London for many years.

“I can’t judge Margot,” Dennis-Benn said during the panel. “Margot doesn’t know what love looks like.”

The third author on the panel was Rumaan Alam, whose novel, “Rich and Pretty,” is about the twists and turns in two women’s friendship.