PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

"The Wild One" by Suzi Quatro
This is the song I would say describes how I really feel inside and who I want to be. If I could have written any song in the whole wide world, this would be the one. That riff and the way she is just not having it, the way she is announcing she is the hottest thing ever, well, I am a believer, and I am sick of feeling bad.

"Any Party" by Feist
I only recently got into Feist, really around the same time I got into liking LA, and this record is very much like that city. The love is so vulnerable and touching and unlike anything I put out. I would not have, previously, ever, in a million years, left any party for any guy...

Describe your latest book.
Mother Winter is a hybrid that is billed as a memoir. I began the book after my second child was born and I was brought low, corporeally, spiritually, and creatively, by the tugs and pulls on my body, time, and brain. I decided that I would get militant about my writing, as militant as I had always wished to be about my feminism, à la Silvia Federici. It had been sitting in me as a lyrical, autofiction novel in the French tradition, and eventually all the disparate parts of the characters and dialogue I was hearing in my head started to find solid ground. I write about a missing mother, one I barely knew, and had left behind in the crumbling Soviet Union of 1989. The collapse of my country and the collapse of my alcoholic mother and my exile all lined up as a chasm for a chorus of new mothers...