Writers Revealed 5.27.07 All About Family…and the bad mother
How much love is enough? What happened to the smiling mother who whipped up batches of cookies and kept a husband, house and home - all with an effortless smile? Does that woman exist anymore and was she the idyllic image of mom? What does it mean to be a good mother? Should every woman be a mother? Join us on Sunday, 5/27, as I chat live with critically acclaimed authors Sabina Murray, Elissa Schappell, Liesel Litzenburger and Victoria Redel as we discuss fractured families in contemporary literary fiction, emphasizing the bad mother. We’ll also discuss the boomer mother vs. today’s mom - issues, pressures, concerns, mom as best friend gone wrong (exhibit A: Lindsay Lohan) and what it means to be a good mother?click here to tune in this Sunday, 5/27 at 7PM est/4PM pst, or subscribe to my show with ITunes! Got a question for the authors about their work or anything in general? Feel free to leave your questions in the comments field and if we ask your question on the air, you’ll score a free book! After the jump, you’ll learn more about the books we’ll be discussing!
Use Me is about girls, sex and death. It’s about the complicated romances that exist between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, husbands and wives, between friends, and in one case a pregnant woman and a nun. It’s about grief, unorthodox desires, and letting go. Oh, and it’s funny.
Review of Elissa’s book in Salon.com
Interview with Ron Hogan
Bio: Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel USE ME, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, co-founder of Tin House magazine where she is currently Editor-at-Large, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.
A Carnivore’s Inquiry follows the wake of Katherine Shea as she works her way through a string of men as she makes her mark on the American landscape. Restless, she travels from New York to Maine and Mexico City trailed by a string of murders. As the killings begin to pile up, Katherine meditates on cannibalism in literature, art and history, from the Donner Party, to The Raft of the Medusa revealing the reasons for both her and her frightening and eccentric mother’s fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.NYT ReviewSSN Review/Interview
Bio: Sabina Murray was born in 1968 and grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels Forgery (Grove, 2007), A Carnivore’s Inquiry (Grove, 2004), and Slow Burn (Ballantine, 1990). Her short story collection The Caprices (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, Grove 2007) was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charilie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She completed her Master of Arts as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant recipient. Murray is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She has served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy Andover and is currently an associate professor of English, Program for Poets and Writers, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Set against the vast lakes and small resort towns of Northern Michigan, Now You Love Me explores the complexity of the adult world through the simplicity of a child’s eye. When her free-spirited mother, Paige, begins to date a well-meaning, steadfast, and perhaps slightly deluded man names Shepherd, young Annie Child learns how complicated love and relationships really are. Eager to make himself welcome and determined to make Paige his wife, Shepherd embarks on a campaign to assume the role of father to Annie and her little brother, Gus. But Paige isn’t sure she’s ready to let him into her life or her little family. As Shepherd tries doggedly and zanily to convince Paige that his intentions are true, he enlists Annie and Gus in his cause. These characters and the world they inhabit will stay with the reader long after the last pages.Liesel Litzenburger’s websiteInspiration for writing the book
EW review
Bio: Liesel Litenburger’s stories and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, The Widower, appeared in 2006 from Shaye Areheart Books/Random House. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she has written for the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Tribune. She has taught writing at several colleges and universities, including University of Michigan, New College and the Interlochen Arts Academy. Her latest work of fiction, Now You Love Me, was published in February of 2007 from Three Rivers Press/Random House.
In Redel’s controlled and convincing tale of a mother’s obsession for her child, the first-person narrator endangers the life of her grade-school son, then asks rhetorically, “Has a mother ever loved a child more?” It is a disturbing question, since the entire novel proves to be the narrator’s heartfelt demonstration of her single-minded devotion to the raising of her son, Paul. Beautifully succinct, lyrically composed chapters give occasionally disturbing glimpses of the narrator gravely ill in a hospital room, but not until the end of the novel does the reader become chillingly aware of how she has resisted the intrusion of the real world. - PW ReviewSmall Spiral Notebook interviews Victoria RedelVillage Voice Review
Bio: Victoria Redel is the author of The Border of Truth (Counterpoint, 2007). She’s also the author of two books of poems: Swoon (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Already the World (Kent State University Press, 1995) and two books of fiction: Loverboy (Harcourt, 2002) and Where the Road Bottoms Out (Knopf, 1995). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
