With Shirley guiding the conversation, Janice will talk about her recently published memoir, “Year of the Water Horse,” which chronicles a journey that began in Braintree, where she grew up in a middle-class family and landed a part-time job as a teenager in a local Chinese restaurant that changed her life. A New York Times Editors’ Choice, “Year of the Water Horse” is a warm and witty memoir about the ever-changing relationships between mothers, mothers-in-law, and daughters that traverses two continents and multiple generations of two very different, yet connected families. Janice and Shirley will discuss the book’s themes of abandonment, loss, and survival, and the journalist point-of-view that this author brings to her book. Former colleagues, the two will also discuss the state of journalism and publishing in today’s highly charged and complicated era for news professionals.

Janice Page was arts editor at The Washington Post. Prior to that, Page was a deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe, where she oversaw publication of books done in partnership with The Globe, including The New York Times best-sellers Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy and Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice and multiple championship sports books on the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins. She has also been on staff at The Los Angeles Times, The Providence Journal-Bulletin and written for The New York Times and MSN. A Boston-area native, Janice graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Rutgers University and was named the 2023 recipient of the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo, where she worked on Year of the Water Horse.

Shirley Leung is a Boston Globe business columnist and associate editor, and host of Globe Opinion podcast “Say More.” For more than a decade, Shirley has been writing on the intersection of business and politics, as well as gender and diversity issues in the workplace. She is also a weekly contributor to GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” and sits on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition. Shirley lives in Milton.

Registration, which opens three weeks before the event, is encouraged (registrants will receive a reminder email) but not required to attend. Kindly sponsored by the Friends of the Milton Public Library.

You can register here!