Big Blue Marble welcomes Laya Martinez, reading from her new memoir at 7pm, Thursday, Feb. 16 in our upstairs reading room.

As the fourth daughter of a prominent Orthodox Jewish family in New York, Laya was expected to follow strict rules and a set path. No one would ever have guessed that the girl who was the most religious of her siblings would, at 19 years old, fall in forbidden love with a non-Jewish man -- or that she would go on to become a successful CEO and a champion for women leaders in business.

When Your Family Says No is a memoir about choice, about the complexity of family love and how desire does not stop because of the confines of rigid family and rabbinical rules.

The book is for anyone who has fallen in love, strayed from their family’s rules of conduct or needed to break out; it’s for Muslims who do or don’t want to wear the headscarf, gay people raised in a born-again culture, teenagers just starting to have doubt and mid-lifers who are about to make a change from a culture that presupposes their identity; for anyone who chooses love over tradition.