Authors Electric

A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier Perhaps it’s an age thing (nooo, don’t all shout at once) but I find myself increasingly drawn to memoirs these days. This has led me to conclude that anyone enduring an eccentric childhood is duty-bound to write about it, if only to add to the sum of the bizarrest human knowledge and general mirth.  This view doesn’t allow for various other essentials eg the ability to write in a way that actually engages the reader…. But I suppose that is for a publisher to decide. In the case of memoirs I’ve read in the last year or so, I am very glad the publishers did decide, and even gladder for the perspicacity of Slightly Foxed Editions , in rescuing many out of print gems and giving them new life. A Late Beginner by Priscilla Napier, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels , Hermione Ranfurly's To War With Whitaker  (though to be fair that is a young person’s memoir, not a child’s) and now, Mango and Mimosa by Suzanne St Albans, whose childhood was ar...

What questions do you wish you had asked long-ago loved ones? I don't know how perceptive my questions or illuminating their responses would have been, I would have liked to find out. Having been a journalist for many years, I learned that interviewing is a demanding but unreliable art that requires repetition as well as unabashed perception. Tougher yet if it's of someone close.  I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later.  Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not. I've always been fond of fa...

The other day, I noticed the words "STEAM PEELED" displayed on a can of tomatoes that I took from the cupboard to make a pasta sauce. I'd probably seen that label or one like it many times before, but this time it triggered a cascade of memories. Canned tomatoes bearing that label would have signified a dream come true for a brief but frenzied period in my life fifty years ago. That's when I came down with tomato fever. For a while there, I was convinced that I was going to get rich overnight, revolutionizing California's multi-billion-dollar ag business and saving the environment in the process.  Tomato fever took me from East to West Coast, from Boston, to California's fertile Central Valley, to Parma, Italy and on to Bejing as part of an international, industrial food processing consortium with a psych-ward nervous breakdown stopover. it's a true story that I still have trouble believing sometimes, an adventure full of sound and fury that netted little ...

As many of you know, my great friend and mentor, Richard Monaco, passed away on June 13, 2017. It has been almost two years now, and I still miss him. I miss our weekly phone calls where we would discuss the finer points of writing, critique each others work (he'd do more of that because I rarely saw anything worth changing in his), talk about good shows to watch on Netflix, or just bitch about the Braves and the Yankees. Me and Richard the night I first met him in person in NYC I loved that man like he was a second father, and in many ways, he was. Nobody took as much interest in developing my writing as he did, and he was just as happy for both my writing and personal achievements as any parent. He was always interested in everything about my life and family. He was always genuinely interested in my wife's job and her graduate school experiences, my son's schooling, and my dog. He never shied away from offering parenting advice: "Stay out of their way unless t...