ILY

by Tova Mirvis, Fleet Cooper (Reading)

Filtered through the post-9/11 world of persistent NSA surveillance, "ILY," honored in the Best American Short Stories 2014, questions the different lives we lead in our own homes and in our own imaginations. Are they that different? Does privacy exist anymore? What can we still hide? Nora, a middle-aged woman who is ignored by her husband and tech-savvy teenage daughter, reconnects with a childhood crush via Facebook. Soon a flurry of daily text messages controls her life, and she wonders whether or not she should make her online life real. But Nora has bigger problems, and we learn that everyone in this family is straddling the line between their authentic and hidden selves. A complex, fascinating story of familial disconnection told within the larger framework of a society manipulated by propaganda, "ILY" explores what it means to live in an era where the choice to live a split existence can be undertaken with deceptive initial ease.

MP3 CD

Published May 24, 2016

About the author

I am excited to share that I have a new novel WE WOULD NEVER coming out in February, 2025. This book was inspired by a true crime story that I have followed over the years and could never quite stop thinking about. How, I wondered, could this tragic story - and so many others like it - happen? Not how did the actual crime occur, but how does a family do something so awful? How does a divorce spiral so out of control? While the news supplied me with an endless array of facts, I always came away from my Google searches feeling dissatisfied, my questions unanswered. As a novelist, I relish the way that fiction lets us go inside character's heads and really delve into their inner lives and all the complexities that we might otherwise hover above. And so I felt compelled to use this story as a springboard and turn those questions into a novel. I was interested in exploring how a family comes to do something they would have once believed they never would; how a divorce can escalate out of control; how people can lose sight of their moral compass; how the inability to forgive can have devastating consequences. We WOULD NEVER is a mystery about a murder but it's also about the mysteries of family loyalty and love and betrayal.

A little bit about me: I grew up in the small Jewish community in Memphis, Tennessee, where I felt both what was grounding about being part of a such an enclosed world as well as what was stifling. This became the subject of m first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary. My second novel, The Outside World, is also set in an Orthodox Jewish world, and is about two families whose children marry each other. In that book I wanted to write about the conflict between tradition and modernity, and also about marriage and dreams and belief and doubt. My third novel Visible City began when I moved from New York City to a Boston suburb. I was so homesick for a city I had come to live, and longed for the anonymous intimacy that comes from living among so many strangers. Visible City is about a woman who watches her neighbors from her windows and becomes entangled in their lives.

After these three novels, I wrote a memoir called The Book of Separation. It originated with an essay I wrote in the New York Times about leaving my marriage and my Orthodox Jewish faith. After the piece came out I was flooded with emails from people telling me their own stories of loss and change and it inspired me to write this book. The Book of Separation is about wrestling with doubt, about trying to be the person I was expected to be and about decided to change, when change felt as terrifying as anything I could do.

I live outside of Boston now and have three kids and three step kids. Besides writing, I love to read, run and play with my beloved dog.