Just a reminder that I'll be chatting at the Barnes and Noble Romance Book Club today. The lovely cover of Madame Mirabou is prominently featured on the opening page. (I still want to go live in that cover shot.)
Come visit if you have time!
I am not a natural synopsis writer. That's just not how my process works--laying out the bones and then working from there to add muscle and flesh and clothing. It always seems to me that the girls in the basement collect a basket of intriguing bits and pieces and leave it to me to sort out. What is this telescope doing in here? And what about this article on dahlias? And what are all these pine needles for?
The Ways of Publishing, however, require me to write a synopsis. I am capable, of course. One doesn't write more than 30 books of commercial fiction without figuring out how to write a synopsis. I just don't particularly like it and it made me grumpy yesterday. There are way too many pages, too many loose ends, and I'm not sure what goes where yet---
And then I remembered that my agent and editor know me. Some writers put together a fantastically beautiful and polished snapshot of the book they're going to write. I hand over a very rough sketch, with blurry faces in the corners and some swirling action and a few strong, bold lines. The book is the thing.
Back to the mines.....
I carried A Moveable Feast with me on the long flight to Philly this weekend. To be quite honest, I carried it more out of a sense of duty, that I should get it read for another project that has been brewing rather than any sense of passionate desire to read it. Not even the fact that I loved the first two chapters gave me any more enthusiasm. My rule for planes is no reading as work, only for pleasure, but I didn't find anything I wanted to read just for pleasure, either, so A Moveable Feast it was.
Now, for the record, I have never been a Hemingway hater as a good many women writers seem to be. As a very young writer, in fact, I found him inspiring--his adventurous life, his drive to write good work, his vividness. Then I found women writers who inspired me more and moved on.
So I carried the book on the plane and I had nothing else to read. I took it out with a sense of being virtuous and smart, and started to read. And--tumbled into it as everyone who recommended it knew I would. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful work! The spare prose, the dry wit, the droll asides, the tenderness with which he views a world that is fleeting, transient, precious. There is, in the wise man writing the story of his young self learning to write, a kindness in his regrets that pierced me: "We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or marble, as this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy."
More on this in upcoming blogs. For today, that richness is enough.
Elena has packed her bags and headed out into the world. I'm left here in my office, packing up the mess she left behind. Weird that all those months and months of scribbling and mapping and brainstorming should result in this box of drafts (four, more or less) and files and notebooks, large and small.
I noticed that I need a new journal, too. This one is getting a little overstuffed. Lately, my little notebooks have been moleskines, so I tried some larger ones for journals. Found myself strangely resistant until I cut out a great photo of a woman in a kayak.
There's my big brain post. The brain, she's gone. Also, the knee, which I somehow twisted. More on that later.
This morning at 9:30, I finally made it to the end of the draft. It is a whole book. 459 pages this moment, though that will change a bit. Because of the way I write, polishing and easing and rewriting (a lot) as I go, what remains is aligning and putting in chapter breaks and filling in all the TKs (To Kome): this one needs a couple more recipes. It's SUCH a food laden novel! I'm going to miss that part.
Or maybe I'll just write another foodie sort of novel.
I keep thinking I must be almost done with this book, but like some funhouse tunnel, it suddenly stretches out again.
Eating weird things. Yesterday, sesame crackers were the food of choice. And sprouted brown rice bowls because they're easy and fast and nutritious. It is so important to eat nutritiously on this kind of end of book marathon, and it's hard. Last night, I made the superfast spinach tortellini soup I love so much. Ten minutes and sticks to your ribs very nicely.
Tonight, duck tamales, leftover from my cooking spree a week ago. The cherry mojo wasn't preservable, so I'm going to try some roasted red pepper jam, which I bought at the farmer's market in Pueblo. Should be great, actualy.
The day I bought the jam, along with some Rio Grande Wild honey (a favorite of Pancho Villa) which the woman collected from wild flowers at the headwaters of the Rio Grande. It's as dark as molasses and very rich. Mostly, I loved buying those artisanal jars of elegant jams and honeys from a character who could subtitle honey like that.
Which is a great reason to frequent farmers markets. Characters. Good honey. Stories.
"Fur, feathers, farts and scales! What a marvelous presentation of romantical
dragons, showing off for the ladies of their choice, happenstance or
traditional. A very good collection for all hungry draconphiles, aka
dragonlovers. Well written, stylish and above all inventive, Dragon Lovers is
sure to please readers of all ages."
-Anne McCaffrey
A new anthology for fans of the fantasy novellas will be out March 1. Because Jo Beverley, in her phlegmatic English way, is so good about getting the word out, we have a great website for it (designed by Karen Harbaugh), and there will be a beautiful silk and silver dragon necklace given away on February 20, so hurry over to find out details.
For those of you new to this angle of my work, there's actually quite a bit of it, starting with Irish Magic I & II, then Faery Magic, with the gang, and now our dragons. This is all for good fun and high romance, so enjoy! (And isn't that a fab cover???)
Dragon Lovers
ISBN 0451220390
March 2007
The second part of the interview at WRITER UNBOXED is up, if you're interested. I'm excerpting this paragraph not because I am so brilliant but because I'd like to talk more about the definition of romance.
Q: Do you have an opinion regarding the definition of romance?
BS: I wish it could be broader, honestly. Romance is about two people falling in love. I’m not always happy with the stringent way that seem to sometimes be defined as something like, “two relatively young, usually white, genuinely good people who are attractive and intelligent finding middle class comfortable love.”
There’s nothing wrong with those stories, of course. I love them, too. But I believe in romance, man! I believe in messy, upsetting, wild love that erases all boundaries. I want to read about love really conquering everything. I want survivors who get love the second time around and multiracial and blue collar and everything else.
When my son was home at Christmas, I said something about the differences between women's fiction and romance novels (both of which I'm proud to claim) and he said, "I always thought 'women's fiction' was just a euphemism for romance novels.'"
I'm not sure when the term "women's fiction" started being slapped on so many novels. I'm not crazy about it, honestly. It seems faintly disdainful and so specific. There probably are a lot of people who think they would not like a "women's fiction" novel, when in fact, they'd like a lot of them very much. (I think that's true of romances, as well, but I've stopped trying to convert anyone.)
But no, women's fiction and romance are not the same thing. Romances are part of the women's fiction realm, which is simply "stories about women's lives." A romance is about a woman falling in love with one particular man and finding unity with him.
(This, of course, excluding the man/man subset of erotica which...okay, that's just getting too complicated for the discussion here. Someone else can tackle it.)
Women's fiction might have some romance in it, and some love, and some mating and some sex, but it usually focuses more on the navigation of a particular challenge in a woman's life--a transition, perhaps, a challenge with family or making peace with herself or others, or getting through a divorce or a career change or a death. Women's fiction is free to focus on the mother-child bond, the friendship bond, the challenges of careers or illness or whatever.
All these labels. There has been some pressure on me from both sides to let go of my romance roots and keep quiet about it (some mainstream reviewers find the stench of romance unbearable, even if most of them have never read any and do not understand the genre). The romance community sometimes views my women's fiction titles as something of a betrayal (as when Trudy, in THE GODDESSES OF KITCHEN AVENUE, has a passionate affair with her neighbor).
Just for the record, I'm resisting pressure from both sides. An artist can work in more than one form. I like both romance and women's fiction. I'll continue to use Barbara Samuel mainly for the mainstream work, and Ruth Wind for romance, so readers who want to avoid one or the other are able to do so.
But if you're on one side of the line, you might give the other a try.
What say you? What do you think of these definitions and labels? Do you read more in one area or the other?
A snowy Saturday. (Surprise! That's five in a row if anyone is counting.) The installers came to put in the new window. I cooked. Becau
se, well, that seems to be what I do these days. I cook to write and write and cook and then write some more.
First, a velvety chicken stock from a leftover rotisserie carcass. Wings, skin, half an onion, 3 sliced garlic cloves. Boil till velvety. I had no celery, so used celery salt, which worked just fine. I did have some fresh whole mixed peppercorns, red and white and black, and they're great in everything.
(Scribbling, as I cooked, on a yellow notepad for MIP. Wiping hands on chile pepper apron bought in Santa Fe for Valentine's Day last year. Splashes of stock smear the ink a little, but I can still read it.)
Next up, the creme anglais or custard for the apple galette that was meant to be my main event. CR will eat custard by itself, and his mother sends packets of dry custard that's really not bad, but I wanted to give it a try from scratch. Confession: I'd never used real vanilla bean before, and it was so interesting! What a delight to discover those teeny specks in vanilla flavored things are seeds! I loved the smell of it, and the stickiness. And I've never met an egg I didn't want to separate, so that was fun too. When I finished it, stirring as instructed, over a pot of ice water, I carried a spoonful up to CR and his eyes widened satisfyingly. "That's good!"
Since the guys were not finished, I decided to make the pastry for the galette, too. Here is another confession: I love cutting butter into flour with a pastry cutter. It's such a satisfying job. I love adding ice water, too, and using my granite rolling pin, which stays so cold. (A friend of mine gave me the rolling pin when I was divorcing. It was a joke, but it's fantastic, one of my favorite things. If I had to leave my kitchen with five things, it would be in the box.) This dough recipe uses apple cider vinegar, and I loved the way it smelled.
The window was finished (oh, happy day--it's beautiful) and I went upstairs to write. Last night, I made some new charts and noticed some things I hadn't realized about the main idea. I made a work list of things that need doing, which things must be rewritten now and which can wait until the end of the rough draft. A scene suddenly appeared ripe--as if the Girls sent up a whole script--so I wrote it, and it didn't even have anything to do with food. A motivation appeared, rooted in something much darker than I knew.
I ended up with eight solid pages in about an hour and a half, plus one of the tough scenes rewritten.
Then I ran and went back to cooking. The chicken/corn chowder simmering while I sliced apples and thought of a book I'm reading: Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, by Edward Espe Brown. Cooking as an exercise in mindfulness: when you wash the rice, wash the rice. I sliced the apples and measured flour and stirred the soup and tasted a pinch of dough, a misshappen piece of apple, admired the falls of peel from the scraper. I tried to get the peels off in a single curl, but didn't succeed .
We ate the chowder. I strongly considered starting with the pie, it was so beautiful. We resisted, but not for long. We ate it warm.
Oh.
That crust, glistening with sugar, was flaky and perfect. The surprise dazzle of oranges in the apples instead of lemon made the flavors explode in our mouths. We ate tiny bites, admiring. Stopping. Looking. Tasting again. Those apples. That crust. The custard with its teeny seeds of vanilla (a wee bit too much, methinks, cut it back a little next time). Outside, the wind battered the trees again, and snow is falling again, but here inside, we had hot soup and warm pie and cold custard, made from scratch, and really a person could not ask for much more.
Buy this cookbook: DESSERTS THAT HAVE KILLED BETTER MEN THAN ME by Jeremy Jackson. I cooked and wrote like a madwoman over the chocolate torte last week, too.
Couple of links today. Writer Unboxed posted the first half of an interview we did a few weeks ago: A Writer Unboxed
And Westword, a Denver newspaper posted a very fun map. Click on #47
And for those aspiring writers who are sure there are no new book contracts to be had, here's a lovely first sale story at Melissa Francis's blog (aka Mel-O-Drama, which I still think is a great blog title for a writer.) Bravo, Mel!!!
I've reached the middle of the book. The muddy, muddled, mucking-about middle. I'm not particularly cheerful. (This is the point where I will start making drama in the world to save me from trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing with the book.) What I know, after doing this so many times, is that this is a normal stage, if not a particularly pleasant one.
That flashy, dazzling, Venus flytrap of the beginning is a long way back there now. And the giddy, shaky pleasure/relief of the end is still way, way ahead. There is just now, slogging away, trying to believe that it will be a book.
This is hard on writers, and it's hard to explain to others how it feels to be a creative person in progress. There's no product, and there won't be for a long time.
So, last night, I baked a chocolate torte from scratch. Five simple ingredients. Many satisfying steps. Really excellent cake, which I'm trying to ignore.
The small goals of running a little longer each each week, of actually going to my yoga class every Tuesday and not just doing some work at home, also help me get through this stage. The massage therapist asked me if I was shoveling a lot of snow, which made me feel buff.
And artist dates. Just getting out and breathing air is good. Hikes feel like an accomplishment, but everything is still very icy, and promises to be worse after this weekend.
And well...a blog is a finished thing, too.
Now, off to the muddy middle.....
At the local mall, there is an import shop I like a lot—I think the owners are Nepali (Nepalini? Nepalese?)—but it is, in any event, a collection of all things India, Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet. Brightly colored silks, scarves and skirts, embroidered jackets and cloth shoes, carvings and books and wall hangings. I buy scarves there, and my statues, and books and yoga CDs. I am not a shopping maven—it exhausts me and scatters me to go into a mall, though I have no idea why—and I like to go into the shop to ground myself at the end of an excursion. I wander in and smell the essential oils and incense and finger silks and hold statues of various things and feel much better.
On New Year’s Day, Christopher Robin and I went looking for a golden pig to commemorate a good year, and the man in the store wore a plastic top hat with Happy New Years written on it in sparkly letters. He gave me a small pink bag, probably to commemorate the day though I didn’t ask. It pleased me immensely and I’ve put it in my purse to hold coins.
We didn’t find the pig, but CR found a good knitted sweater with a hood and I liked him buying something from this place on this day, connecting us to the outside world. As he paid for it, I admired the altar on the counter, a dark wood carving of Ganesha, with other smaller gods around his feet, and a pink powder scattered over their heads. I noticed a rolled up dollar bill stuck into one of his hands.
There were other things there, too, all with some meaning I don’t know, and I liked seeing it there, a frank admission of belief in a Higher Power.
As we wandered around the New Year’s Day mall, I started thinking about altars. Every nail shop I’ve ever visited for a manicure has an altar in it somewhere. Some are quite elaborate, waist-high with red houses and bamboo in small glass vases and laughing Buddhas with food at their feet.
In Pueblo the locals celebrate St. Joseph’s tables, which are
enormous groaning altars to the feast of St. Joseph. Yes, that one, the father of Jesus, whose feast day is in March. It came from Sicily, where Joe did something miraculous that I now forget—saved a town from a flood?--but many of the local churches have adopted the tradition and fill tables to truly groaning with competitive baked goods.
Day of the Dead and descansos figure heavily into my current work in progress—and what is a descanso but an altar to a beloved dead one? Descansos, which are everywhere in the southwest, are a main thematic element in LADY LUCK'S MAP OF VEGAS. Day of the Dead altars are spectacular—for pure color and celebration, they’re hard to beat. Sugar skulls! Marigolds, bright orange and so lively! Pink paper and fragrant foods and pictures of the loved one.
In Santa Fe, I once fell in love with an entire world of very old Tibetan altars, antiques with dozens of niches and bright paint and the loving sense of hundreds of hours of prayer imbedded in the wood. It seems such an object could only bring reverberations of peace into a room. I would like putting my feathrs and rocks in the niches. I have often thought of trying to make one, paint one for myself in those bright oranges and yellows. Surely the painting would be an act of devotion.
My books are filled with altars—GODDESSES OF KITCHEN AVENUE is notable because Trudy has them set up around her house, and learning to be herself means taking those secret beliefs from her hidden place into the main house—but they appear in most of my novels at some point or another.
And, not surprisingly, in my real world. I have them everywhere. In my car is a small plastic Virgin of Guadalupe with a rope of rosary beads looped around her feet, beads I made at a Solstice gathering in a drought a few years ago. Each decade is a new color.
In my office there are two, the main one, beneath a beautiful photograph of tulips, with photos of my children and symbols that represent the work, and friends and my life in various aspects, and one that is specifically for the work, with a cigar box altar I made from all sorts of things, and a statue and an orb I found once in a rock shop, a luminescent egg-shaped stone that shimmers blue and black and fits my palm exactly. In the dining room is a mosaic table filled with plants and an open bowl my mother gave me and two candles to represent harmony, and a happy, laughing Ganesha. (When we all began to live in different places, my children and I all purchased Ganesha to symbolize our connection to each other). I like him. He’s a happy guy, so fat and lush.
I find myself lighting candles at the altars, touching the head of that one, putting flowers on another. Sit and offer prayers. Pass by and give up a worry—take care of that, will you? Stop and kneel and think. Breathe. One of my favorites is features an eloquently carved weeping Buddha and a happy laughing one are side by side, reminding me that life contains aspects, and both are holy. (And I realize I don't have one for running--intriguing challenge!)
It seems altars are a happy thing, like humming under your breath, a way to recognize the sacred in the every day—in writing, in eating, in exchanging goods and services for coins, in driving, and simply being. Why not an altar on the stove or on your dashboard, one to honor your creativity and your husband and your life? Why not?
Edit: I had to do some cover art stuff for a romantic suspense coming out in July, and man, it's FULL of altars. I should have called it Miranda's Altars, though that wouldn't be very genre appropriate.
I love to hear of home altars in particular, and would love to know of those you’d be willing to tell us about. A grandmother, an aunt, one in a shop you visit, or one that’s strange and you don’t understand, or one you built yourself. If you have a picture you want to share, please do.
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas is now online at the Target BreakOut Book site. Impossible to tell you how pleased I am about this.
This book also won a RITA this summer. As I may have mentioned.
Eldora sashayed into my imagination one night when I was working in a boarding home for schizophrenics and other mentally ill patients. (One of the hardest and most interesting jobs I've ever had.). She came in, smoking and laughing, and I thought, "I can't write a story with a 60-something woman in the starring role!" She winked and said, "I'm not in the starring role, sweetie. That would be my daughter, India."
Which is true. Kind of. Check it out.
Excerpt from |
It's funny how the moments that change your life sneak up on you. The night I met Jack, saucer-sized feathers of snow were falling out of a heavy pink sky. I walked to the pub, not minding the kink the moisture would give my hair. There's nothing quite like the soft air of a falling snow. Light from the pub, with a proper Irish name-O'Connell's-spilled yellow onto the sidewalk through a mullioned window. I could hear the rush of voices inside, and there was an agreeable sense of happiness in my chest. New work. That was what I was thinking about READ MORE. |
Sarah at Smart Bitches posted a great review of one of my historicals, LUCIEN'S FALL, published in 1994. It's a good example of why I enjoy reading their blog--they treat romances as real books, and discuss them in that tone:
His efforts to deny his gifts and hide his emotional and musical sensitivity are reflections of his ability to hide or squander any good intentions he might have of behaving with honor. Thus his music and his morals are tied to one another as Lucien faces his own demons and acknowledges that he must change himself and modify his own behavior if he wants to become worthy of Madeline.
I tried to post my appreciation, but can't read the code word.
What I remember about writing this book was being absolutely insanely in love with this tortured, lost man who really needed to connect with his music. I listened to Bach over and over, lots of baroque music on a cassette tape that I played on headphones day after day (my office was in the center of the house and I had two boys). I have a taste of red velvet in my imagination, and the lost city of Pompeii, and a vision of a castle ruin on a green, green hill.
I really miss writing historicals sometimes. Do you suppose the darker variety will come back?
Then again, I suppose a person can't write everything.
My uncle told me about this CD: Lhasa, The Living Road a couple of weeks ago. I listened to one song and went out to find the whole CD that afternoon. It seems to becoming the soundtrack of the MIP, very exotic and musky and dark.
Excellent news!
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas has been selected to be a Target Breakout Book! It will show up right after the holidays. I'm really thrilled, and will run a contest for this--the first five people to spot it at their Target store will receive a pair of autographed books (I'll take requests, but no guarantees). When the day gets closer, I'll remind you.
Yay for Eldora!
As I wandered around this morning looking at the blogs I like to read (I keep meaning to ask if I can link to some of them) I noticed a lot of cooking posts. Seriously, about five! I documented my cooking adventure Sunday (well, Christopher Robin documented a lot of it) and I'm embarrassed at how many things there are in my freezer. Bags and bags and bags of frozen soups and stews and casseroles, divided into neat serving sizes. I'm either preparing to write 17 hours a day or expecting blizzards any second. Maybe both.
People do tend to nest and cook at this time, me included. But my Sunday cooking adventure is really about the MIP. Food is a huge part of this book and I'm trying out recipes like crazy. Some of them are taking me way beyond my skill levels, let me tell you! :) Sunday's adventure was a southwestern version of duck l'orange : Chili-cumin-dusted, pan-roasted duck breast with orange cider chipotle glaze, marinated grilled tomatillos and roasted-chili-spiked green apple chutney, a recipe published in The Dish, from the Colorado Springs Independent . The recipe had so many steps I couldn't wait to try it, and I've been wanting to cook duck because CR, being English, loves it insanely. I have eaten it at times, but tend to be a little squeamish.
The protagonist, however, would not be. She'd know how to handle duck or mussels (which defeated me entirely once upon a time) or elk or beef bones. So I have to at least get a feeling for it. What does duck even look like raw? While cooking? How does it smell? I had no idea.
CR was more than happy to let me experiment on him (and went around all day more like Winnie the Pooh, humming "we're having duck for dinner, duck for dinner, duck for dinner" instead of "honey, honey, honey.") so we collected all the ingredients on Saturday afternoon. We found duck breasts at Whole Foods, of course. Big and luscious and plump, if you're wondering. Dark meat with thick white skin over them, nearly a pound per breast (and quite dear at more than $16 per pound.)
Safeway had everything else---and I loved buying the tomatillos ("husked and rinsed in warm water"), 
green apples and red onion, and apple cider (reduction) as much as the duck. Sunday morning, I started with the chutney, so the flavors could stew, letting the sweet/hot scent perfume the house.
What I learned: I loved the chutney. Sharp and smoky and hot and cidery, I could eat it by the spoonful. The marinated, grilled tomatillos were spectacular, though CR did not care for "those little green tom-ah-to things."
The duck is a dark, hefty, game meat. Rich and very fatty. It took much longer to cook than we expected, and I felt worried about overcooking it, ruining it, somehow making it the wrong experience. CR said, "it's for play, remember?" and I relaxed and put the breasts back in the oven and let the glaze reduce while I opened the wine, an inexpensive Beaujolais, and ladled roasted red chile peper jam into a tiny bowl to go with the cornbread (which was my additio
n to the menu). Finally, it was all ready and CR took a picture of the table. (Those are my sari curtains in the background. :))
And you know, it was amazing. The musky, deep flavor of the meat, the sharp sweetness of the chutney balanced by bland, buttered cornbread and the light red wine. The roasted red pepper jam was not only great on the bread, but really, really great on the duck.
I can't say I'd order duck on a menu any time soon (though I think I'd like to try this dish at The Margarita Restaurant), but CR tucked away a lot of bird and he's not always a big eater, so I had a big rush of Me Woman, Feed Man that will probably lead to more experiments. Maybe something traditional like roast duck with cherries.
After dinner, I went upstairs and wrote five pages, so I suspect my heroine liked it, too.
PS: We made duck pizza with the leftovers: boboli crust, duck stewed in duck sauce from a jar, hosin sauce as the base, green onions and very light scatters of goat cheese. VERY good.
Have you ever experimented with a dish that was a little beyond you? Or try and flop?
Saturday, 30th, 7-8:30 pm, I'll be signing books in the Sears Court at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. There will be a Q&A and several authors will be there, including the very smart and interesting Jennifer Crusie with writing partner Bob Mayer.
Lovely email this morning from Laurie at AAR, letting me know that Lady Luck's Map of Vegas has captured a Desert Island Keeper review, the tenth they've given my books (thank you.) A snippet:
Did you ever read a book that has you telling every person you come in contact with to read it? Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas is that book for me. I feel the need to go to my local bookstore, stand in the "S" section, and subtly point out this title to all who pass by. This 2006 RITA award winner lived up to all my expectations.
Thanks, Lisa.
Readers have told me repeatedly that they like to have some questions in hand for book clubs. These are the questions from the Cherry Forums discussion (which continues until Sept 30 if you wish to join in).
Caution--some minor spoilers might be here.
1. Divorce is very common in American society, and yet it is still often the most traumatic thing that happens in an adult life. In Crazy Time, Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life, Abigail Trafford cites statistics that show the dangers of becoming a divorce “flameout:” alcoholism, hectic sex, or an inability to engage or maintain intimacy. Learning to navigate those dangerous waters becomes very important. Nikki and Roxanne present two ways of managing the delicate post-divorce period, and they have different results to show for it.
What did the two characters do differently? Was everything Nikki did the right thing? Were all of Roxanne’s actions self-destructive, or were there times different choices could have taken her in a different direction?
2.Nikki’s business and perfume journal are called Scent of Hours, and she makes perfumes to celebrate the moments of a life. It’s human nature to want to concentrate only on the moments and memories in our lives that are positive, but often we learn more in the dark times than in the bright ones. Do you think Nikki became a stronger, wiser person by undergoing the divorce? Or would she have been happier, long-term, with her marriage?
3. Nikki is re-entering the dating world after more than twenty years with the same man. Sometimes, it’s a little awkward. How did you feel about her first sexual experience, with Wolf? Were you embarrassed for her? Repulsed? Understanding? What about the first intimacy with Niraj? Were you appalled, disappointed, or did you understand?
4. Nikki’s marriage is interracial. How much a part did race play in the disintegration of the marriage? Do you think there are extra pressures on interracial marriages, or are those pressures easing? How did you feel about her conflicts regarding her daughter?
5. The original working title of this book was Scent of Hours. A second author choice was Madame Mirabou's Emporium of the Senses. Would one of those titles have made more sense for this book? How much does a title influence your choice to pick up a book? And how much does it shape your expectations?
6. A sense of place is often a marker of Barbara Samuel’s work, and Madame Mirabou is set specifically in Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs, where Samuel is native. Can you tell how the author felt about the setting? How does the setting contribute to the story? Does having the mountains make a difference to the characters? What about a large military population? Could this book be moved to a different place and remain the same?
7. Did you like the book? Why or why not?
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