Ask the Author: Mitzi Mensch
Answered Questions (9)
Mitzi Mensch
Once I have read a book by an author I like I enjoy following that author. Thrity Umrigar is one of my favorites. I have read The Space Between Us and If Today be Sweet. Now I want to read her memoir, First Darling of the Morning since I want to know more about her own life growing up in India. Other books she has written that I would like to read are The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven and Bombay Time.
Another favorite author is Lionel Shriver. I have read her psychologically perceptive novels We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World and So Much for That. Now I want to read some of her other works: A Perfectly Good Family, The Female of the Species and The New Republic.
Obviously I like women writers, but because I like to stretch myself and learn about the human condition I want to read What Is the What by Dave Eggers. I thoroughly enjoyed his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and want to see how he portrays The Lost Boys of the Sudan.
Another favorite author is Lionel Shriver. I have read her psychologically perceptive novels We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World and So Much for That. Now I want to read some of her other works: A Perfectly Good Family, The Female of the Species and The New Republic.
Obviously I like women writers, but because I like to stretch myself and learn about the human condition I want to read What Is the What by Dave Eggers. I thoroughly enjoyed his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and want to see how he portrays The Lost Boys of the Sudan.
Mitzi Mensch
The biggest mystery in my own life is a medical one and, yes, I have written a book about it. The Dangers of Kissing and Diet Coke: What Your Doctor Doesn't Know and Won't Bother to Find Out is a medical mystery that sizzles with the parallel story of unrequited love. What is wrong with Mitzi's head? This is the primary question. What makes her scream uncontrollably and what makes her body jerk around involuntarily in a bizarre manner? What made her headache come on abruptly one day without warning and what will make it go away? And what is it with Goldie? Is he simply living in a fantasy world by trying to make a high school romance come alive again after 48 years? Mitzi's medical mystery and turbulent love affair are thought provoking and compelling leaving the reader with a lot to decide.
Mitzi Mensch
My favorite fictional couple is Florentino and Fermina from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Why is because it is about a couple who fall in love in their youth but they are destined to be apart for over 50 years at which time their love is renewed. Adding to the 'Why' is because the story has such similarities to my epistolary novels, Goldie, My First Love and Goldie, My Last Love about a couple who went steady in high school and reunite almost 50 years later. The passion of first love is enduring and unending.
Mitzi Mensch
What's that? The only thing that blocks my writing is other encroachments on my time. I struggle against the minutiae of life to free myself to write.
Mitzi Mensch
Inspiration is all around. It is everywhere in daily life. It is in people I see, in what they say, in what I hear, in how I take their meaning. It is in nature, in what I sense, in how I feel. It is in all the sounds around me, and the smells and the tastes. Inspiration fills my senses and bombards me every waking and dreaming moment. Figuring out which inspiration to reach out and capture and interpret is the conundrum. There is not enough time in a lifetime to give each and every inspiration its due.
Mitzi Mensch
The best thing about being a writer is communicating with a reader. When someone says, "I've felt that way too!" I know I've done my job well.
Mitzi Mensch
Find something else to do! Spend your time having fun!
Mitzi Mensch
What I am working on now is FROM THEN TO NOW, a novel within a novel. Maggie figures that with events being so old it is safe to tell the story of her first marriage. Figuring wrong is her first mistake. Downloading the manuscript onto her grown daughter's computer is her second mistake, setting past and present on a collision course.
Mitzi Mensch
I've been asked where I got the idea for RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED. It's all about "What if." What if you take a situation to the next level and write about it. That is what I did in the case of RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED. In real life I walked out of a dermatologist's office where I had been seen for what we know here in Hawai`i as haole rot, and I asked myself that question – what if? What if my sun exposure hadn't just led to unsightly red spots on my fair skin? What if the cream the young, beautiful, white-skinned Asian woman doctor had prescribed didn't clear up the discolorations? What if her admonitions about the harmful effects of the sun's rays had led to more than blotches and scales and her warnings about melanoma were more than warnings? What if . . .
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