Letters from the Writing Desk
When Being Wanted Means Being Useful
October 2026
There is a particular pleasure in meeting someone who asks a question and waits for the answer. No glance at the phone. No interruption with a better story. For a little while, we feel that what we say matters.
It is an excellent beginning for a friendship. It is also an excellent beginning for being used.
While writing La Ronde, I kept returning to the difficulty of telling the two apart. Someone may enjoy our company and also find our confidence, connections, or willingness to help useful. Both things can be true.
The title means “the round dance.” Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen, the novel follows five women and five men through linked encounters until the last returns us to the first. Each change of perspective reveals something the previous character could not see. Two people can inhabit remarkably different relationships while sitting at the same table.
Monica was especially interesting to write. An outspoken feminist, she recognizes the tactics by which men diminish women. Yet a politician who seems to understand her touches a hope her knowledge cannot protect. Intelligence offers many advantages, but immunity to longing is apparently not included.
Carmen, whose beliefs are more traditional, has learned a different lesson about being worthy of love. One woman has learned to serve; the other to speak. Both can find themselves waiting for recognition.
The men needed warmth, humor, and vulnerability, too. Their appeal had to be understandable. Someone can be delightful over dinner and careless with another person’s life.
Writing the younger novelist was particularly uncomfortable. He listens, notices, remembers—all valuable qualities in love and in his profession. But when does a lover’s confidence become material? Writing him required me to leave the judge’s chair occasionally.
Still, I wanted room for affection that escapes calculation: a meal prepared with care, an unguarded joke, the pleasure of ordinary company.
At the end, the circle closes. Someone takes an empty seat. Perhaps everything will happen as before. But recognition that arrives too late for one encounter may arrive in time for the next.
Why Does Hof Continue to Appear in My Fiction?
September 2026
I have lived in California for more than fifty years. Still, when I begin a story, I sometimes find myself walking through Hof again. I know the way to the Wäldle, the little forest near our house. I can see my father in his navy-blue beret. I can hear the voices of people I have not heard for decades.
Hof gave me my first experiences of imagination. In kindergarten, our teachers took plays and performances seriously. We played the flute. We became characters from Frau Holle and Hansel and Gretel, of Goldmarie and Rapunzel. I discovered the pleasure of stepping into a story and, for a little while, believing in its world.
After school, there was the Wäldle. My friends and I gathered raspberries and wild strawberries and played Räuber und Gendarm, robbers and policemen, among the trees. I learned to ride my Roller there when I was four. Once, my sister tied it to her Vespa and pulled me along the paths, über Stock und Stein—over sticks and stones. It was thrilling until I fell. The scars are still on my knee.
Those paths hold memories of my parents, too. They loved and cared for me, and I grew up listening to their stories. My father was the kindest and gentlest man I knew, a Francophile and a pacifist by heart. Yet he had been sent to fight a war he hated. He was taken prisoner in Russia, escaped, and came home gravely ill with malaria, having lost an eye.
On Sundays, we had picnics in the Wäldle. Papa played his harmonica, sometimes choosing mournful songs about the comrades he had seen fall beside him. As a child, I knew that something terrible lay behind the music, though I could not yet grasp its full meaning. I knew the man who spread out our picnic and wore his French wool beret. Only gradually did I understand what he had survived.
My mother had survived her own ordeal. She had been jailed for listening to Allied radio broadcasts and accused of involvement in the attempt on Hitler’s life. What astonished me as a teenager was that she had forgiven the people responsible. I had learned what had happened to her, and I was furious. I mistook my anger for a clearer understanding of justice. It took me much longer to recognize the strength her forgiveness required.
At the Gymnasium, the past felt close. Among my teachers were true humanists who opened my mind; there were also remnants of the Nazi years. I was growing up in a town I loved while discovering things about its recent history that I could neither excuse nor forget. The questions that began there—about courage, character, complicity, memory, and forgiveness—have followed me into my books.
I looked outward. John F. Kennedy and Jackie seemed to embody an America full of possibility, and I imagined its democracy as something carved in stone. I wanted to travel, to encounter other languages and ways of life, to find out who I might become elsewhere. I knew leaving would cost me the ease of belonging to the place and people I knew best. I went anyway.
Now I see that my wish to leave was also part of what Hof had given me. The kindergarten teachers who encouraged us to perform, the stories my parents told, the humanists who taught me, and even the painful questions I could not settle there had all stirred my curiosity about the wider world.
When Hof enters my fiction, I return to it with the life I have lived since leaving. A forest path can recall a childhood game, a fall from my Roller, or my father playing a song whose sadness I understand better now. I write about people shaped by their histories who still have choices to make. Hof is where I first saw how difficult those choices could be. It is also where I first learned to imagine my way into another person’s life.
Novel in progress · Historical literary fiction
The Staircase: When a House Remembers
June 2026
I am presently working on a novel set in the Franconian town where I was born. The Staircase began with a question that has followed me for years: Can we ever truly possess a house when its walls contain the memories—and perhaps the suffering—of those who lived there before us?
The novel moves between postwar Germany and 1990, when a woman returns to her place of birth and begins uncovering the history of a Jewish family displaced from a familiar house. As she searches through letters, photographs, and the guarded recollections of those who remained silent, the house itself seems to become a witness.
I am still discovering the story as I write it. What draws me forward is not only its mystery, but its deeper question: What do the living owe the forgotten?
Can a Writer Ever Truly Leave Her First Language?
March 2026
In our house in Hof, breakfast began with a gong. My mother, whom I called Mielein—short for Muttilein—would twirl its wooden striker, and three copper bells would announce that it was time to hurry. Papa was usually at the table already. Our Pausenbrot, dark bread with cold cuts or cheese, had been wrapped in wax paper for school. Coffee dripped through a paper filter into the pot.
If I had missed the bells, my mother called to me: “Sonnilein, Mäuschen - Frühstück!”
No one in America has ever called me Sonnilein or Mäuschen. When I remember my mother, though, I hear those names exactly as she spoke them. I hear the bells, too.
After school, I played hopscotch—Himmel und Hölle—with Sigrid or Uschi or Kurti on the sidewalk. We played badminton in the street, stepping aside when the occasional car came through. In summer, we went into the Wäldle behind our house, gathering berries and making up stories among the trees.
I can tell an English reader that Wäldle means “little forest.” But the translation does not quite take me there. The Wäldle was a particular place with its own paths, games, and remembered voices. Even the little article belongs to its name as I knew it.
Years later, when I came to Los Angeles, German was no longer the language I heard around me every day. I was fortunate that my first work at UCLA was teaching German, because I could enter the classroom and speak with confidence. Outside it, I had much more to learn.
The English I had studied in Germany was largely British English taught by a German teacher. At LAX, American speech seemed astonishingly fast. People shortened words, joined them together, and slipped jokes into conversations before I had caught the meaning of the first sentence.
I remember showing a cab driver the address where I needed to go and asking how far it was and what it would cost. I cannot recall his answer word for word. What I do remember is that he called me “ma’am.” For a moment I wondered if he meant Madame. How elegant, I thought. After fourteen hours in an airplane seat, I sat a little straighter.
I began listening closely to Americans. I wrote down expressions, shortcuts, turns of phrase, and the quick wit that could change the direction of a conversation. At first, I was trying to understand what people were saying. Gradually, I began to hear how they said it: where they paused, what they left unfinished, how affection or impatience could hide inside a joke.
I hear the effect of that listening in my fiction. My earlier writing relied more on narration. In my later novels, characters often carry a scene through dialogue. They tease one another, disagree, avoid an answer, or say more than they intended. I enjoy following what happens between them when I let them speak.
English became the language in which I taught, lived much of my life, and wrote my fiction. Yet my parents and my sister still speak German when I remember them. German and English do not occupy separate rooms in my mind. A word in one language may bring back a feeling that helps me find a sentence in the other.
From my terrace in Southern California, I watch the sunset spread purple, red, gold, and pink across the sky. It gives me a sense of space and possibility. Another sunset takes me back to the staircase in my parents’ house in Hof. I am sitting on a wooden step, looking through the window at the light caught in the chestnut trees of the Wäldle. I can hear a blackbird singing. I am a child loved by her parents, with questions about the world that she has only begun to ask.
Both skies belong to me now. When I write in English, I can still hear the bells calling us to breakfast and my mother calling me Sonnilein.
Perhaps a writer never fully leaves her first language because it remains one of the places from which she writes.