in progress

working on two other novels

i’ll come following you

I had the great good fortune to be able to travel overland from England to India when you could still cross all those borders, before the Iranian Revolution and before the Soviet-Afghan War. I first heard stories about India when I hung out at a macrobiotic restaurant called The Seed in London; guys with long hair and clear eyes would talk about things they had seen and done in India, about how you could live for months on almost no money, about people who were kind to them and holy men who did remarkable things. I believed it all and wanted to see these things for myself. So I went.

A kind of love

Years ago, my husband and I visited Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts. We were intrigued by the living history interpreters: the woman who cooked over an open fire for her family in a dark little hut; her taciturn husband, who didn't seem grateful or even aware that he should be; an entertaining villager (not a religious type, he was quick to inform us) who held forth in a more comfortable home and answered visitors' random questions with wit and surprising accuracy.

As we left the village, we wondered what it would be like to inhabit the persona of someone from a different century. Would you lose track of yourself? If you fell in love with another interpreter, how would you know whether you fell in love with that person or with the role they were playing? What if you just fell in love with a different time and place, and your partner was part of the package?