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The Writing Life: An Interview with TaliaAlso please check Q & A for specific novels : Q: You left a successful business career to become a novelist. What has prompted the change?
A: Stories find me, pull me, and don’t let me go until I am done writing them. That is what happened after I had been caught in the 1993 uprising of the Russian parliament against Boris Yeltzin. I had been there on my second mission that year to teach women entrepreneurial skills. Their valiant struggle for a foothold in a strange, new world was awesome and inspiring. On November 3rd, 1993, at 2:46 PM I sat down to tell their story—and started a new career. While HOTEL SPUTNIK was never published, the idea for the next novel, PUPPET CHILD, caught me full force when I wandered into a lecture at the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing and learned of American judges who put children in the hands of their molesters. The question of “What if it happened to me and my child?” compelled me to study the subject and write the book.
Q: Wasn’t it on this trip to China when you started researching for CHINA DOLL?
A: True. The seed of the story about the commitment of an adoptive parent to a child had been with me long before I had become a writer. But on this trip to China I had been unprepared to find what I did. The horrific material and my emotions were so overwhelming that I put my notes away. Then, just after completing PUPPET CHILD, I came across the lines from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “…A flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” The words described my baby in CHINA DOLL. I couldn’t abandon her again.
Q: It seems that each of your novels begins with a nugget of an idea--a phrase, an errant thought, or a fraction of emotion.
A: And then coaxed to full bloom. In writing fiction, I am fascinated by the notion of living inside another body and of having a completely different set of reference points, from cultural allegories to music, food and dress. I am intrigued by the way physical landscape shapes the people who are either confined--or freed--by it. Therefore, while I have traveled extensively, I don’t belong to the places in which my novels are set, nor am I quite of the people that materialize in my stories or novels. The most exciting part about writing is dipping a ladle into the fountain of my own imagination and drinking from it. Then comes the research, which is incredibly fascinating and further fuels my imagination with new plot twists. However, one thing I need not invent is the overriding emotion I bring to each work from someplace familiar--be it the power of motherhood, the commitment to friendship, the pain of a traumatic childhood, the quest for personal growth, the anguish of filial responsibility, or the joy of love.
Q: You’ve been quoted to say that “writing is not what I do, but who I am.” Your e-mails are mailed in the wee hours. How much time do you spend writing?
A: If I don’t work in the middle of the night, then from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep, I write, research and edit. I take breaks for the business of life: daily dance or exercise classes, for meals, for time with my husband, family and friends. When I write a novel, ten hours can fly by without my notice. It’s like being in the middle of a dream. You live it, you feel it, you see every detail—but you lose the thread when you wake up.
Q: Yet, you didn’t start writing until you’ve put in years in another career. Where, then, did writing come from?
A: Not any kind of writing, but rather fiction writing. I come from a long line of storytellers--my grandmother, my mother, and her sisters. As early as second grade, I used to make up stories for my friends, and looking back, I can see that I had a knack for language. Growing up in Israel, at age six, I taught myself the English alphabet and began "collecting" words. I wrote them down in a notebook and learned hundreds of words I was unable to put in a sentence. When I was 10, I won the prestigious Bialik Award for Hebrew literature. As a teenager studying at Alliance Française high school, I selected French as my language of choice for poetry writing.
Q: So you have three languages to choose from. Why English?
A: Since I’ve been living in New York for over thirty years, I breathe and dream in English; that is the language I am most comfortable in for my writing. I love reading Hebrew literature. It’s so incredibly rich in texture and grammar.
Q: Your bio mentions the corporate world. What did you do before becoming a full-time writer?
A: In the last chapter of my business career, I founded Business Women Marketing Corporation, a consulting firm whose clients were Fortune 500 companies. I was the only one offering consumer-product companies a new perspective—and programs—reaching the upscale career women's market. My company was the first to research and document in the late ‘80s the emerging segment of women entrepreneurs. I forced a debate on the government’s definition of female business ownership, which ultimately established the White House Oversight Committee and changed the way the Office of Labor Statistics gathers and analyzes its data.
Q: In your Wall Street Journal piece in 1997 you weren’t enthusiastic about this new trend. Why?
A: In too many cases, entrepreneurship has become the new women's ghetto—earnings lower than minimum wage, no benefits, and often large personal capital risk. Glorifying it is unhelpful.
Q: Yet, you did it yourself in establishing Business Women Marketing Corporation.
A: Before starting my company, I was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine, and before that I worked as a marketing manager at Redbook. And I have a degree in economics. More importantly, my mission wasn’t necessarily to make money for myself: Over $1,000,000 of the proceeds of Business Women Marketing Corporation went to benefit professional women's organizations that, in turn, invested in educating women in their respective industries. In addition, I taught entrepreneurial skills to women as a volunteer at The Small Business Administration’s affiliates programs.
Q: Women's issues are the themes in your novels. Do you believe that the job of a writer is to educate?
A: Perhaps. For me, writing is another way of bringing women's issues to the forefront. It was my experience in Russia, where I went twice in 1993 to teach women business skills that jump-started my writing career. HOTEL SPUTNIK (not yet published) was written as the cry and the triumph of the spirit of the women I met there. When I traveled to the International Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995, I was to be a presenter and a panelist in various economic seminars. However, my attention was hijacked once I was exposed to the issue of violence against women worldwide. After watching a video about clitoridectomy, I helped African women develop a program educating their governments about the brutality of the procedure. I helped Indian women campaign world leaders about coercing the Indian government to enforce its laws about burning of brides.
Q: A reviewer of PUPPET CHILD hailed you as “an author with the power to change society,” which you did with the national launch of The Protective Parent Reform Act. What do you see for CHINA DOLL?
A: PUPPET CHILD is set in Long Island, New York, and is a protest against our justice system, which betrays and destroys children who come seeking its help. Trying to change this system is somehow doable. CHINA DOLL is a cry against gendercide in numbers that are simply astounding in a foreign land, under a totalitarian government, among people that are accustomed to the devaluation of human life, in a tradition where an individual has no importance. I will work with any organization that seeks to save and improve the lives of girls in China.
Q: Your mother is a successful Israeli painter. Do you, too, paint?
A: Artistic ability streaks through the veins of many females in my family. I have sculpted a bit, but never had the passion and patience for it. In my next life, though, I aspire to be a singer and a stand-up comedienne.
Q: Where does family fit in your life?
A: I have a great husband, Ron, whose tender care always created an incubator where I could grow and blossom in whichever direction I chose. I have two wonderful daughters and two stepchildren. Our four children and their spouses are all friends, which means that I have eight young people in my life. We enjoy each other’s company and spend most weekends together. With babies they’ve produced these past few years, we make a happy, large family.
Q: Your novels are either set overseas or have some overseas scenes. Doesn’t it complicate your work?
A: International settings are natural for me, as is thinking about big government or macro economies. Coming as I do from a foreign culture that has absorbed people from around the world--and having traveled, worked and lived abroad--I am fascinated by the cultural nuances that can only be observed by an outsider. Insiders often fail to see the uniqueness in their own customs or surroundings. Yet, there is universality of human emotions that is the common denominator crossing cultural boundaries. That is what I emphasize in my writing.
Q: You served in the Israeli army.
A: Yes, I did that too. I’m still unable to write well about that experience. Imagine an eighteen-year-old sending a reserve officer on an assignment--he’s already married, has a couple of kids--and then I get his file back, assigned to Unit 2. That is the morgue. Or even describe to you now why I can’t touch it. However, not having had a lobotomy, there is always a side of me that is highly involved with current events. For me 9/11, while devastating, was not an unexpected disaster. I had researched the subject. In August 2001, I had started writing a novel about a woman who discovers conspiring Islamists in her home town. After 9/11 I had to put the project aside.
Q: What does developing the writing craft involve? Can one learn it?
A: Since I began writing fiction, I attended a dozen serious workshops and conferences such as the prestigious Iowa Writing Festival, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, The International Writing Guild at Skidmore, the University of South Florida, and The New School in New York and others in Houston, Dallas, Santa-Fe, and Desert Springs. And while I have also worked with professional editors on my novels, my writing buddies--both online and in my face-to-face writing group--have been my greatest tutors.
Q: What about those "muse" and "discipline?"
A: I don't find them elusive, because what I want most of all is to write. Writing is the outlet for my outrage over injustice, prejudice, and ignorance.
Q: The antagonist in your novel seems to be growing in its power and invincibility.
A: (Laugh) From the legal system in PUPPET CHILD to the world’s two superpowers in CHINA DOLL. Yes. And in Jerusalem Maiden I am about to take on God.
Q: Where do you see yourself heading next, as a person and as a writer?
A: Upon it’s release, I don’t know yet know how CHINA DOLL will shape the debate over China’s treatment of human rights issues. But I know that mine is one of the lone voices out there criticizing it for genderside; even the U.N. Commission about violence against women hasn’t put gendercide on its agenda. However, since I have been surprising myself all these past few years since I began writing, I plan to continue to be surprised.
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