Bio
I grew up in Fresno, California, where I braved – like other fellow Fresnans both native and imported - summers of scorching valley heat, but also regaled on the most divine peaches, grapes and tomatoes ever. There is much to say about Fresno, but I will not say it here, not for now. I have written a story or two about it in my collection, The Lost and Found and Other Stories.
I graduated from Mills College in 1986 with a degree in French Literature and left for France where I spent a year teaching in Marseille, a rather wicked city - blanched on the outside, gritty on the inside. From there I moved to Paris to study literature and French critical theory at the Centre des Etudes Critiques. Influenced by French writer and feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, I became an assiduous attendee of her Saturday seminar at the Collège de Philosophie on the rue Descartes for two years. There we convened with a coterie of writers who have left an indelible mark on my psyche and plume: Clarice Lispector, Djuna Barnes, Karen Blixen, Thomas Bernhardt, Kafka, Joyce, Jean Genet…1
After finishing my Maîtrise de Lettres Modernes at the Université de Paris VIII, I began teaching English and writing my first collection of stories, The Lost and Found and Other Stories, which was published by New York University Press in 1994 and awarded the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. The tales in this collection explore the experience of exile as offering the possibility of reinventing the self, though not without running the risk of self-delusion. The stories have been described as “earthy and spiritual, particular and universal, and often very sly and funny.” (New York Times)
Over the past twenty years that I have lived in Paris, I have taught English and literature, worked part-time as a journalist, translated for numerous publications and magazines, belly-danced and practiced Qi Qong, whilst continuing to write short stories and, more recently, novels.
Remedy, my first novel, is set in Paris and recounts the adventures and musings of its eponymous heroine, a devout but unorthodox Catholic girl knocking out fashion copy at A La Mode On-line. Remedy is limned by my wonderful editor at Portobello Books, Laura Barber, as such: “…She may have her feet on well-trodden expat ground, but she has her head in the clouds and the path she walks through Paris is distinctly original. When she’s not dreaming up articles about this season’s must-have accessory or foiling her best friend’s attempts at match-making, she attends mass with a blind nun, shimmies her way through belly-dancing classes and meditates on the lives of the saints. All the while, believing that spiritual enlightenment and romantic fulfillment might be just around the corner…”
I should add that Remedy is actually not a novel about fashion or the swinging singleton experience. It is not even about love really, though it recounts a romance. The novel’s central conceit is a playful cover for my usual concerns, namely female experience in its multiple dimensions, otherness and stretching the English language to accommodate it, religion, paradoxes of all shapes and sizes, and celebrating excess in its many (symbolic) manifestations.
Recently I’ve been teaching creative writing and literature at The American University in Paris. I also continue to translate, notably the essays and conferences of French writer and theoretician, Julia Kristeva.2 My novel, Patsy Boone, which I wrote directly in French, will be published by Editions de la Différence in September. I’m working on a new novel that seems to be about motherhood, an experience which Julia Kristeva, claims has never been and perhaps cannot be represented. But as I said, the novel only seems to be about motherhood, and besides, writing is always about representing the unrepresentable.
1 I simultaneously attended the seminar of another celebrated (if only abroad) French thinker, Luce Irigaray, who spoke not of literature but of linguistics. Her bravest idea at the time involved revising the sexist Fr2ench convention whereby a group of women in which one man is present must be addressed in the masculine “ils” rather than the feminine “elles.” Irigary proposed to remedy this outlandish practice with an equally outlandish correction which consisted in alternating the privilege from year to year, so that in 2008 say, we would refer to a group of men in which one women stood present in the feminine (“elles” ) and the next year revert back to the current use of the predominant masculine. The idea here seems to be that if such a grammatical rotation were put into effect, it would boost the status of women (at least every other year) and lower that of men just enough and only temporarily so that they would realize how the ladies have felt for quite some time. Centuries even. I should add that Irigary came to class attired in an indigo Chinese worker’s uniform whereas Cixous arrived sheathed in an ermine coat under which she wore satiny silk blouses and beautifully tailored pants. The latter I admired for her grandeur, the former for her linguistic idealism and commitment to Maoist couture. Great ladies, each in her own way, I think.
2Though attending Cixous’ seminar was the highlight of my academic week, I distinctly remember one Saturday when the discussion did not wing its way boldly to literary heights, but only spent its steam sputtering on the runway. This was a few days after Julia Kristeva’s novel Les Samouraïs came out, a thinly disguised tale of Paris’ Left Bank intelligentsia in the tradition of de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins. During the entire six hours(was it really six? It seems hard to believe I could sit so long on my bum, but then I was younger and hadn’t gone through childbirth and all the rest…) of the seminar Cixous ranted about the novel, damning it from so many angles and for so many reasons, her complaint, it seemed, could easily have spilled over the capacious six-hour stretch of seminar. There was so much fuming going on at the throne it was hard to make any sense of the queenly condemnation. Though afterwards I wondered if the source of Cixous’ displeasure was not finding a veiled version of herself in the book or, if she had gleaned one, did not find it flattering. At the time – I was young and quaintly idealistic – I lamented the lack of feminine complicity, the dearth of mutual support between these two great ladies who, in my eyes, shone as beacons of the life of the mind redeemed for the fairer sex. But now I know that rivalries rile even the best of us. No one is deaf to the bark of the passions; few fail to woof when provoked.
