Laurie Hertzel in Conversation with Leif Enger

Zenith Bookstore celebrates the launch of Duluth native and journalist Laurie Hertzel’s memoir Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, A Death, and the Hills of Duluth. She will be in conversation with best-selling author Leif Enger, sharing her new book and her journey. There will be a time for questions from the audience.

Every family has its stories and secrets. Laurie Hertzel’s family had more than its share. At an early age, Laurie, the seventh of the ten Hertzel children, took on the challenge of sorting them out. Not old enough to be one of the Big Kids, yet too old to be with the Three Little Kids, she spent most of her time alone, reading, wandering, and observing her family as they moved around her in their house in Duluth. Though her parents were not warm, there were moments of closeness in those years—gifts of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and special trips to the dairy for a sundae—but everything shattered after the sudden death of Laurie’s oldest sibling, eighteen-year-old Bobby, when she was just nine years old.