What author/s do you think are overlooked in the writing/reading world today?
Authors who are not celebrities have a hard time getting published today. What does being a celebrity have to do with producing good literature? Why has the publishing industry lost its commitment to connect talented authors with hungry readers? Is it all just about business now? Thank God the Internet has come along and given independent authors a voice.
What author would you most like to meet and why?
Françoise Sagan. She had it all: style, austerity, chic, wit, ennui, the whole gamut of what the French refer to as "je ne sais quoi" – "I don't know what." It's probably just as well that she's dead, since I'd be jealous. She represents everything that I want and some things that I'll never be. She was French. I'm not. She wrote her first novel and masterpiece, Bonjour Tristesse, when she was seventeen. I wrote my first novel eight years ago. It hasn't yet been identified as a masterpiece, and I wasn't seventeen at the time. I hate that woman's guts. No. I love her.
Do you have any upcoming projects that you would like to share with readers?
Yes. I'm halfway through the sequel to Paris Adieu, Black is Not a Color ... Unless Worn by a Blonde. It's the story of Ava's relationship with her father, who has a heart attack soon after she returns to New York from Paris. Caring for him consumes her, putting the brakes on her budding romance with Pierre, the Frenchman she has met at the end of Paris Adieu. There's another more important man in her life whom she needs to figure out first.
Zsolt Fodor is a Hungarian poet fond of saying crazy, cryptic things such as "black is not a color unless worn by a blonde." No one understands him, foremost of all, his daughter. Ava learns how to accept, love, and care for the man who fathered, but didn't raise her. It's a struggle, but with the help of friends she's made at her new job at the United Nations — a few Serbs and a Romanian — she begins to understand something of her father's own fractured background and the difficulties he has endured as an immigrant in New York City. By learning to love and forgive her father, Ava learns how to look at men in a new light. But is it too late to find Pierre again? And if she does, is she ready for the real, real thing? I can't wait to finish the story and find out myself, so I can share it with readers.
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