The Found Object Society Book Launch with Author Michelle Maryk

Virtual Talk Highlights:

• Find out how late 19th century New York inspired author Michelle Maryk's first novel, The Found Object Society, a novel that explores the nature of grief, mortality, addiction, and regret, while slyly interrogating wealth and privilege
• See how the "Rat Pit" on Water Street in the South Street Seaport, a building with an undeniably dark history, fits into the story
• Discover what Maryk's novel reveals about current day NYC and the societal changes that have shaped the city

About The Found Object Society:

For twenty years, Greta Davenport has lived with the guilt of surviving the accident that killed her parents. She’s tested the limits of her own mortality ever since, but little gives her the dopamine rush she craves. Not until the night she almost drunkenly crashes her car into a tree, and a peculiar blank card slides under her front door—an invitation to the Found Object Society. 

What she discovers there is beyond comprehension: an opulent, subterranean playground filled with aisles of objects from different eras and regions of the world. Pick an object and go on a voyage to relive the final moments of the person who died holding it, along with an unparalleled, irreplicable high. Greta’s hooked, but she can’t quiet her questions about the society and its enigmatic creators, the answers to which have implications far beyond her growing dependence on the voyages. Death is addictive, and what she uncovers will put her entire life into question.

A fever dream of a novel, The Found Object Society examines the depraved whims of the ultrarich and the breadth of unresolved trauma—all while asking how grief and the choices we make in its aftermath can change the course of our lives.

About Michelle Maryk:

Michelle’s first attempt at novel writing came at the age of eight and was scrawled into a tiny, green spiral notebook. The title: I Hate Tuna (imagine the horrifying true story of the book Alive, but instead of the plane-crash surviving protagonist resorting to cannibalism, she’s forced to subsist on her most-hated food, canned tuna). Ah well.

Born and raised in Princeton, NJ, her mother is Swedish and her father is first generation American with Albanian parents. Her heart and soul are deeply rooted in the family’s little house on an island in the Baltic Sea. She’s a dual-citizen of Sweden and the US.

There was rarely a time in Michelle’s childhood where she wasn’t trying to drum up a ghost (by way of seance or the Ouija board); locate proof of extraterrestrial life; or sneak off to buy Big Wheel cupcakes and Twizzlers at the local Wawa. As a kid, she was obsessed with all things supernatural and watched and read as much creepy stuff she could get her hands on.

She attended Cornell University and the Yale Writer’s Workshop. After college, she moved to NYC and altered course to pursue a comedy, acting and voice-over/commercial career (which she still does today).

In 2019, she circled back to her first love of writing narrative fiction—none of which involves canned tuna—and has written four novels since then. The Found Object Society is her first.

Fun fact: Michelle starred in an atrocious horror movie alongside Oscar-winner, Cliff Robertson, called The13th Child. The movie was written by… Michelle’s dad.

She and her husband live in the Hudson Valley along with their two bonkers cats.