Literary Lights 2026: Featuring Aram Saroyan
Join us for the sixth installment of Literary Lights 2026 featuring Aram Saroyan, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Before I Forget, in conversation with Shahé Mankerian, the 2026–2028 Altadena Poet Laureate Editor-in-Chief. The virtual event will take place on October 4, 2026, at 10:00 AM Pacific | 1:00 PM Eastern | 9:00 PM Armenia Time. Register here.
In Before I Forget: A Memoir (and Then Some), Aram Saroyan remembers his beginnings in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Bolinas. The son of the beloved author William Saroyan and step-son of Walter Matthau, he probes the fallout of his father and mother’s broken marriage and lessons gleaned in their wake.
Saroyan paints a series of scenarios that impacted his life: An eight-year-old is cast out on the comic sea of Beverly Hills in the fifties. A young man encounters fame working with photographer Richard Avedon and a revolving list of models, including Marilyn Monroe. A journey to nurture his own authentic, original literary voice finds love and support when least expected, balancing the prickle of critical controversy. Here is a multi-faceted artist’s valedictory.
The book includes 20 rare photos from the author’s personal archive and two narrative novellas that frame Saroyan’s life in literature with imaginative reflections and sharp emotional insight.
Praise for the Book
“One of the last living witnesses to the age of Jack Kerouac and the road trips of postwar American performance, Saroyan offers brief essays on the lives and loves of the era. . . . A vivid recollection of an age when every day could be a dream.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Aram Saroyan bullets the memoir formula the way he busted up poetics with his minimalist poems, on which, not so incidentally, he dallies in this resilient, often hilarious sketchbook of a brilliantly impudent multidisciplinary journey.” — Ellen Sander, author of Hawthorne, A House in Bolinas and Trips, Rock Life in the Sixties
“Along with a fascinating account of Aram’s journey to literary fame, the memoir paints a vivid picture of the 1950s and 1960s . . . .of growing up in a counterculture that promoted “free love” and believed in the use of drugs to expand human consciousness. Leaders of this counterculture, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, are ever-present. So are Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Gloria Vanderbilt, Oona O’Neill, among others. Whether in Los Angeles, Bolinas, London or New York, Aram moves in the world surrounded with the celebrated poets, artists and movie stars of the day.” — The Armenian Mirror-Spectator
Aram Saroyan is a poet and author best known for his minimalist poems. His Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is featured in the documentary film One Quick Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac at Big Sur and his comments appear in the oral biographies George Being George: George Plimpton’s Life and Salinger. He is the author of Still Night in L.A., Trio, and the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage, as well as many other books of prose and poetry. He lives in Newport Beach.
Literary Lights 2026 is our fourth annual reading series showcasing new works of literature by Armenian authors, cohosted with the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event—held online or in-person—features a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Read along with the series by purchasing Before I Forget and more titles at our Bookshop.org storefront.