Authors Andrew McCarthy and Dani Shapiro in Conversation at Darien Library on May 1

Andrew McCarthy, author of "Just Fly Away," and Dani Shapiro, author of "Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage," will be the Darien Library’s featured speakers on Monday, May 1 at 7 p.m. Books will be available for purchase, and refreshments will be served.

In "Just Fly Away," when 15-year-old Lucy Willows discovers she has an eight-year-old brother living just a few blocks away – the result of her father’s brief affair – she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her life. How could Lucy’s father have betrayed the entire family? How could her mother forgive him? And why isn’t her sister rocked by the news the way Lucy is? Her father’s secret becomes her own and isolates Lucy from her friends and family. Telling no one - with little cash in her pocket, no plan, and not even a change of clothes - Lucy vanishes from home and hits the road looking for answers, determined to get to the bottom of her family’s habits of lies and secrets.

"Hourglass" is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time - abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning - a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

Andrew McCarthy is an award-winning travel writer, a New York Times bestselling author ("The Longest Way Home"), a renowned television director ("Orange is the New Black" and "The Blacklist"), and of course, an actor in iconic coming-of-age films ("Pretty in Pink," "St. Elmo’s Fire," and "Less Than Zero"). McCarthy now turns to young adult fiction with his debut novel, "Just Fly Away."

Dani Shapiro is the best-selling author of three memoirs and five novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on This American Life. Dani was recently Oprah Winfrey’s guest on Super Soul Sunday. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, and Wesleyan University; she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Dani lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

The Darien Library is located at 1441 Post Rd. in Darien, Conn. For more information, visit darienlibrary.org or phone (203) 655-1234.