Anita Diamant’s most recent book is Day After Night.
–Name a childhood hero.
Helen Keller was a childhood hero, partly because we share a birthday. I read what seemed like a whole lot of biographies of her. By the time I saw “The Miracle Worker,” I knew that story by heart.
–Name a work you wished you’d written.
“Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner. But then, I would have had to have been born a gay Jewish man.
–If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
I think “Saying Kaddish” would probably top that list. I wrote this book for mourners when the memory of my father’s death and my experience of mourning within Jewish tradition was very close to me. Which is why I think I got the tone right.
–Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
I am perfectly thrilled to be alive and writing in present company. Tony Kushner and Stephen Sondheim, Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, David Sedaris, Toni Morrison, my pals Stephen McCauley and Amy Hoffman…. On and on and on
–Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
I do not think of myself as an especially spiritual or religious writer/person. Many readers ascribe those qualities to me in ways that make me uncomfortable. I am not a rabbi, nor do I even play one on TV.
–Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Condescension to the reader.
–Name your five desert island films.
Shakespeare in Love, Bull Durham, Walk on Water, The Lives of Others, All About My Mother
–Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
The Art of Eating by MFK Fischer
–If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
I’ve been given the opportunity to revise/rewrite a few of my non-fiction guides, and loved being able to improve the writing. I suppose I’d like the chance to revise The Red Tent, but I think I would be a brutal editor so better to leave it alone.
–Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
Leaves of Grass
–Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
My writing group and coffee.
–Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
Keeping my butt in the chair and not losing faith in the project; for help in this regard, I depend upon my writers group.
–Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.
“Where do you get your ideas?”
–Name a question you wish you had been asked.
I have spoken to so many groups of readers over the years that I often feel that I’ve been asked every question there is … including some inappropriately personal ones that I don’t answer. And yet, from time to time someone asks a new one. For which I am deeply grateful.