A Prideful Shame: Notes on the Essence of Delaware County

David Amadio, author of the Athenæum Literary Award-winning novel Rug Man (2023), returns to talk about Delco's cultural identity and how HBO's Mare of Easttown changed the region's perception of itself, ushering in a strange vanity, antithetical to its long-standing inferiority complex. He asks how he, as a Delco-born novelist, can write without pandering to the hype and, in a larger sense, what role fiction plays in reconciling the contradictory nature of people and places.