Saturday, June 27th at 2 p.m.: By age 15, Lisa Jakub had already achieved the dream that many have to become a professional actor. But by 22, Jakub realized that it was time to go back to the real world. The Mrs. Doubtfire and Independence Day star comes to One More Page Books to discuss her memoir, You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (Beaufort, $25).
Jakub’s ascent to Hollywood started when she was four years old, after being approached on the street to audition for a commercial. Acting was thrilling — she got to go to fancy parties, travel, and meet Princess Diana. At the same time, Jakub was growing up on film and trying like any teenager to feel comfortable in her skin.
Because the profession was all she knew, she kept going as if on autopilot without understanding that there were other options out there. Soon, she felt like it was spinning out of her control. Jakub writes, “there is no such thing as ‘successful enough’ in L.A. … It’s never enough: it’s always on to the next audition, the next job, the next hit. It’s addictive, and it started to get dangerous for me.”
A fleeting moment of approval would make her wired for a week, she says, before realizing she still didn’t feel whole. Some actors turn to substances to deal with this feeling, but Jakub fortunately realized her problem in time to just leave and start fresh.
Jakub’s experience as a child actor is unique, but her book examines questions we all encounter about our passions and purpose in life.
After acting in more than 40 movies and television shows, Jakub studied sociology at the University of Virginia and is now an author.
This event is free and open to the public.
Tuesday, June 30th at 6:30 p.m.: This past April, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged on 30 federal counts for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing and he has been sentenced to the death penalty. Despite all the attention on him and his brother Tamerlan, little is understood about their motives. In The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy (Riverhead, $28), Masha Gessen delves into the Tsarnaevs’ backgrounds from the perspectives of a journalist and, more implicitly, fellow immigrant. She will be at Busboys and Poets Brookland to share the story.
The Brothers breaks down into three parts to describe the larger context in which Tamerlan and Dzokhar operated. In part one, “Dislocation”, Gessen explores Tsarnaev family history in the former Soviet Union, the brothers’ parents, and their cultural upbringing. Part two, “Becoming The Bombers,” focuses on the family’s tumultuous decade after coming to America and the brothers’ lives and mindsets leading up to the bombing. In part three, “The Aftermath,” Gessen discusses the disturbing post-bombing investigation into other immigrants the Tsarnaevs knew, including Ibragim Todashev, the Chechen immigrant killed by the FBI in his Florida home in the month following the bombing.
This context also serves as the landscape for some of the author’s theories, new questions, and personal conclusions. Instead of seeing their “radicalization” as a specific point in time, she explains it as a gradual process intertwined with their split senses of identity.
Overall, a main message in The Brothers is that the events before and after the bombing have lessons for the future. In the first page, Gessen pays tribute to the enormous pain caused by the bombing, but clarifies that The Brothers is not quite about that: “It is about the tragedy that preceded the bombing, the reasons that led to it, and its invisible victims.”
Gessen previously authored The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. She has also written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Slate, and other publications.
This event is free and open to the public.
