From Berkeley Library
By Dan Vaccaro
When Dorothy Lazard recognized that aging meant losing some of her most formative memories, she did what any longtime librarian might — she decided to catalog them.
That act of preservation shines in the local author’s debut book, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World. This week, Lazard treated a rapt audience to selections from her work at the Luncheon in the Library, an annual event for UC Berkeley Library supporters.
Lazard said the memoir-as-“recovery mission” was meant to commemorate her 50th year in California, and was inspired by her desire to understand how she became who she is today. The moving work of creative nonfiction recounts Lazard’s childhood journey from St. Louis to the Bay Area in 1968, and focuses on the author’s first decade in California...
Dorothy Lazard is an alumna of the School of Librarianship, a predecessor to the School of Information. She went on to work at Oakland Public Library and the Oakland History Center under the library until she retired in 2019. She recently released a memoir called “What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World.”
