Beatrice @ The Merc: Elisa Albert & Barbara Suter

The series for debut novelists at the Mercantile Library has been going so well that the Merc and I agreed to stage more events this month and in May. I hope you’ll come join us next Wednesday, March 11, with Elisa Albert and Barbara Suter, starting at 7 p.m. at the Mercantile (17 E 47th St.) with a brief wine reception immediately following the reading.

Elisa Albert (The Book of Dahlia) is currently editing an anthology about sibling relationships called Freud’s Blind Spot, to be published in 2010. She is a founding editor of Jewcy.com and an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University.

Actor and playwright Barbara Suter (Dorothy On the Rocks) has worked extensively in New York and regional theater. She was a member of the comedy group, Rumble in the Redroom. Her play, Finally Flannery: My Search for Flannery O’Connor was produced off-Broadway at New York Theater Workshop and at the Lucas Theater in Savannah, Georgia. She has worked in radio including Small Things Considered for NPR, and in the role of Annie in the Peabody Award winning radio drama, Breakdown And Back. She is presently working on her second novel, Night Flight, which involves two women, one man, lots of baggage and plenty of drama.

6 March 2009 | events |

Author2Author: Sylvia Brownrigg & Brenda Webster

When Brenda Webster responded to my invitation to do a guest essay for Beatrice by suggesting a Q&A with Sylvia Brownrigg, I was all for it—I interviewed Brownrigg a decade ago and admired her work greatly, and the themes of her latest novel, The Delivery Room, seemed to go well with Webster’s Vienna Triangle. The two authors will be making a joint appearance at Rakestraw Books (Danville, California) on March 19.

Sylvia Brownrigg: In writing a novel about Freud, how did you come to choose Viktor Tausk, his doomed protégé, as one of the major figures of your interest?

Brenda Webster: The idea for the novel came to me in Rome. I was reading Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar about how Goethe sucked the life out of everyone near him and used it for his own purposes whether son, secretary or potential character. This sounded similar to something I had read years before about Freud and Tausk and made me wonder if genius was in general incapable of tolerating great talent. Since my mother thought of herself as a genius this had personal resonance as well.

SB: I am guessing from your memoir, The Last Good Freudian, that you drew on your own family’s relation to some of the historical figures in Vienna Triangle. Did you consciously use certain details from your own family history?

BW: Helene Deutsch, a prized member of Freud’s inner circle figures prominently in my book. My mother had been a patient of Deutsch’s in Vienna, after a suicide attempt, and seen Deustch later as well, and I had been told that she helped my mother with her sadism towards men and made it possible for her to marry. What I wasn’t told until near her death was that Deutsch had abruptly terminated her after a year saying rather brutally that some people just didn’t cut it. I hadn’t thought of this parallel with Tausk until you asked!

(more…)

5 March 2009 | author2author |