Category: On Writing
The Truth as I Know It
One of the pitfalls of writing fiction is that people think you are writing about yourself. To some degree, we all are, of course. We weave facts and experiences from our own lives into our stories, and we write about issues and situations we care about. But we are still creating stories, not writing memoir. […]
The Beginning Of Everything
About a month before I finished The Beginning of Everything—which was about three weeks after the book was technically due to my editor—my roof started leaking in a place where it had previously been patched. I was right then in the process of writing about my slow and ongoing recovery from a spontaneous spinal CSF leak […]
Why You Don’t Know My Name
You don’t know my name. And there are a few reasons for it. The first, and most obvious, is we’ve never met. As I prepare to release my debut novel, I am very much at the bottom of the mountain squinting up at its white peak. I have no reader following, a shamefully low amount […]
Psychoanalysis and Memoir
I am a psychologist, psychoanalyst, former patient and a writer. I have recently completed my memoir, The Tell. In thinking over these different roles I’ve come to see how much they have in common and how one naturally embraced another. It was my mother’s suicide that gave me the impetus to begin college. I was […]
Why I Love to Be Alone
Do you like to be alone? I know it’s not true that all writers are introverts, that there are those who like to write in teams, or who do their writing in busy cafés or at the kitchen table, enjoying the background chatter of family life. For me, though, being alone is one of the […]
In Search of Home
When I was four years old, my parents and I immigrated to the United States as Soviet Jewish refugees. I grew up speaking Russian and English, holding onto some traditions and values of the old world, while learning the customs the new. While my current married name might belie my roots, being an immigrant is […]
Finding the Confidence to Write The Missing Girl
I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Essex and Berkshire, the youngest of five children and an only girl. I was quiet and shy and spent most of my time reading and writing stories. My parents encouraged me with trips to libraries and bookshops. Most […]
In Praise Of The Blind Item
I want to know less about more people. Admittedly, I’m partial. In researching and writing my new novel, Another Side of Paradise, I became thoroughly acquainted with Sheilah Graham, a columnist who pioneered gentle gossip even as she was the story, the last love of the very married (sorry, Zelda) F. Scott Fitzgerald. Call Sheilah’s […]
How Publishing My Memoir Helped Me Write a Novel That Sold
I have a grinning photograph from the day my first paperback copies of LOST IN TRANSPLANTATION arrived, taken inside my car. I was so excited I didn’t even wait to get home to open the box. I ran back into our tiny post office and waved my book around, exclaiming “My book is here!” to […]
Why I Wrote My Three Books In My Pensioner Years
One morning in Budapest during the autumn of 1944, an unknown official in charge of deporting Hungarian Jews sent back all the women accompanied by children. My Mother, Leona Grunwald, was one of those women and I was a tiny baby in her arms. I have no means of knowing who that official was and […]
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