Welcome Wayne Hoffman as he discusses his deeply personal true-crime investigation, The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder, with author Aaron Hamburger
About The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder
Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City-based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn’t just a family legend—it made headlines across Canada in 1913—but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg's North End, and his mother’s downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years.
Journalist Hoffman (Hard and two other novels) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of his dual efforts to care for his aging mother and crack a century-old unsolved murder. During the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 1913, someone entered the Winnipeg, Manitoba, home of Hoffman’s great-grandparents, Sarah and David Feinstein, and shot Sarah as she slept in her bed. The killing was even more horrific as Sarah’s two-year-old daughter, Fanny, was in the bed at the time, and Anne, an infant, was in a nearby crib. No motive was ever established, and no one was charged, and though the crime was front-page news in Canada at the time, it fell into obscurity. Hoffman only pursued it after hearing a version of the shooting from his mother, Ethel, who described the circumstances differently. According to Ethel, Sarah was on her front porch, breastfeeding her baby, when she was shot by someone in a passing car. Hoffman makes the details of his dogged research vivid as he strives to reconcile Ethel’s story with the reporting at the time, and his conclusions about the murder are convincing. Meanwhile, he movingly recounts his mother’s increasing memory loss and overall decline. This is a unique addition to the cold case subgenre, and a powerful mix of true crime and family memoir.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Wayne Hoffman is a native of Silver Spring—and former resident of Mt. Pleasant and Dupont Circle—who has been a journalist for more than 30 years. After getting his start at the Washington Blade, he has written for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Village Voice, The Forward, Slate, Out, and dozens of other publications; he is currently executive editor of the online Jewish magazine Tablet. Wayne is also a novelist, whose books include Hard, An Older Man, and Sweet Like Sugar—which is also based in and around D.C., and won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award. He currently lives in New York City and the Catskills.
Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, NIRVANA IS HERE, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and HOTEL CUBA, due out from Harper Perennial in 2023.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, Out, The Bennington Review, Nerve, Time Out, Details, and The Forward. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and his short fiction and creative non-fiction have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prizes.
He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.
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This event will be hosted in-person at Lost City Books! Masks and temperature checks will be required of all attendees.
Accessibility note: This event will be held up two fight of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer's to Solve a Murder will be available at Lost City Books!