Author: Michelle Richmond

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Marriage Pact, Golden State, The Year of Fog, No One You Know, Dream of the Blue Room, Hum, and The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Her books have been published in 30 languages. A native of Alabama, she makes her home in Northern California and Paris.
Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje

I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding consciousness, Anna, lives as an adult. I say “overriding consciousness” because, while Anna narrates some portions of the novel, there are also large swaths of omniscience, as well as points at which the omniscient narrator collides, unexpectedly, with Anna’s voice.

Years after the violence that shatters her family, Anna moves to France to temporarily inhabit the home of Lucien Seguro, a famous French poet. After a detailed and arresting account of the lives of Anna, her sister Claire, their father, and a cardsharp named Coop who was raised alongside the two girls, the novel’s focus shifts to Lucien: his upbringing in the French countryside, his affection for a neighbor woman, Marie-Neige, and her husband Roman, his childhood. Slowly and brilliantly, these stories intersect, held together by a man named Rafael, who becomes Anna’s lover in France.

This is a story about orphans, and about events that drastically alter the landscape of family. It is a patient, gentle book. Ondaatje writes truthfully and unflinchingly about desire. One of the most memorable aspects of the novel is his portrayal of parent-child relationships, particularly between mothers and sons. …

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Ray Bradbury at Home

Ray Bradbury at Home

I just came across this odd and wonderful little collection of video clips, taken at Ray Bradbury’s home in LA in 2001, by the folks who publish raybradbury.com. In it you’ll see the chaotic basement where the exceedingly prolific Bradbury works, and hear him joking about holding the record for rejections from The New Yorker. I didn’t realize until visiting the site that Bradbury had a new book out in 2006, Farewell Summer, a follow-up to Dandelion Wine, first published in 1957. You’ll also see Bradbury talking about linked story collections, something he did way back in the 1940s with The Martian Chronicles, and on how he put together his collection of metaphorical objects from Hollywood and beyond that surround him (according to Bradbury, in the old days all you had to do was ask for something and it could be yours).

David Mamet on Hollywood

David Mamet on Hollywood

Mamet was interviewed in Time Out New York by Joshua Rothkopf. The subject: Mamet’s new book about film, Bambi vs. Godzilla.

Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using the tools of the marketplace. As such, it’s vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people.

On audience:

I write for the audience. The small market or the mass market may be a function of the worth of my script, or of the assiduousness by which it was sold. But, like any other artist, I consider my potential audience everybody alive and half of the people who are dead.

And, by my vote, a Mamet must-read for writers: Writing in Restaurants, circa 1987.

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