Alice Hoffman's Blog

In my new novel The Story Sisters (Shaye Areheart Books) Elv Story creates an imaginary world to help her deal with a childhood trauma that she keeps secret. Stories help her to deal with reality and with her past. In a way, she cannot live without them. 
Each chapter of the novel begins with a piece of what I call Elv's Black Book of Fairy Tales. When added together they complete a psychological puzzle and tell the story of Elv's interior life. She is the sum of these stories' parts, and...

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Is love complicated or is it simple?

In The Third Angel, set in three sections in the 90's, the 60s, and the 50s, all in the same London hotel, it can be both at the same time.

I didn't realize until after I was through writing, that the novel could be read backwards or forwards and that a reader's understanding and knowledge of the story and the characters would be hugely different depending on what he or she knew or didn't know about the past.

In the first section of the novel, a writer...

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The Third Angel Arrives on Tuesday April 8th, 2008.

A novel is formed in so many ways, from so many pieces of a writer's life and consciousness, but The Third Angel began in a hotel in London in the summer of  2004. My UK publisher put me up in a hotel in Knightsbridge for a book tour. It was hot that summer and the rooms were broiling. There were air-conditioners perched on stands, vented through hoses in the open window - so that the hot air continued to stream through.

That first night as I ...

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Who is the Muse?

If the third angel is an unexpected blessing on earth, the person who by the very act of your generosity saves you in return, then is the muse the third angel for an artist?

There are those, like Jamie Dunn, the musician in The Third Angel who can't write and is in a desperate search for a muse, who believe a muse is a person who will inspire. There are others, like Frieda, the young woman Jamie is convinced is his muse, for whom experience itself is the muse. The act of...

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Thank you so much to everyone who sent in comments to my new website. I so appreciate the kind words and thoughts and I'm delighted to hear so many people are looking forward to the arrival of The Third Angel.

Sometimes, when I'm at work on a book I forget anyone will ever read it. I've often wondered if that's what allows me the freedom to write - a detachment from the future of the book at the time I'm working on it. The idea of publishing and being public with what has been created in...

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For me, a novel isn't autobiographical in "real time" - but my life is there, transfigured by fiction. I think of a novel the way analysts deconstruct a dream - the dreamer is every character in his or her dream, including the cat and the dog. Or, think of it this way:  Your life is a mirror. You throw it down on the ground. It shatters into thousands of pieces. You can never recreate the mirror as it was, but each piece is still a part of the mirror, a part of the writer's life.

For me...

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Novels have inside stories and outside stories, sometimes more than one. There are stories that reveal themselves all at once, and others that are a puzzle. My new book The Third Angel is filled with secrets. Some characters keep secrets from the people they love best. Some keep them from themselves.

 Here is a clue to the identity of the Third Angel. Sign my guestbook and I'll send out other clues.

I heard something at my window. I thought it was snow falling, or birds calling, or branches...

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