Some people love to watch swans on the water. I can’t blame them, it’s a gorgeous sight. There, on the flat surface of a pond or lake, beautiful birds glide by, graceful and long-necked, pristine and white. They lift their wings more than flap. They don’t splash. There’s something perfect about the above-surface swan. Okay, but I like what makes it glide. Underneath that smooth surf...
Who sees her as the bad guy? They’re two of the first terms you learn in the study of literature: protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist is the hero, the schnook at the center of the story, the innocent in the middle of a hurricane. It’s easy to sympathize with heroes. Everything seems to happen to them and they’re created to be someone you like. So it should be easy to guess who the antago...
When I was a kid, I used to think Great Writers were also Great People. I mean, how could anyone with such a complete and tender understanding of the human race be anything other than nice? Then I read about Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and O’Neill and revised my opinions downward. Great writers but flawed human beings. REALLY flawed. Worst Parent Ever level of flaws. And Lillian Hellman proved lady write...
How often do you get to interview one of your personal heroes? The first time I saw Sue Ann Jaffarian, I was too afraid to even speak to her. She breezed into the middle of our low-key seminars one day, a bubbly, confident woman with a terrific smile. She talked about her work as a paralegal but I was blown away by her other career as a much-published novelist with editors, a fan-base and everything! Book-nut that I am...
My mother loved historical fiction. In the days when Erma Bombeck was the queen of domestic humor, and would be feminists felt caught between Betty Friedan (too serious) and Erica Jong (too randy) historical novels were a thinking woman’s guilty pleasure. More serious than Barbara Cartland’s frothy stories, less licentious than the bodice and pants-bursting tales of the “Sweet Savage” series and...