#VALLEY OF ASHES MOVIE#
#VALLEY OF ASHES PLUS#

I do know she recently went through a divorce and the agony of conflicting emotions one experiences during that process (been there myself) is painfully clear in this novel. The trouble is, I don't read crime stories to be confronted by the exigencies of growing up. Maybe she just grew up, which everyone is entitled to do, even literary bad girls. I suspect I'll keep following the story of Maddy Dare, for a while at least, but I do regret the disappearance of that wild girl who made me laugh so much. As for the ending - she has set up the next few books as pretty tragic.

#VALLEY OF ASHES PLUS#

It's hard not to see it as a thinly disguised re-run of Read's own personal traumas - she mentions in the acknowledgements that she was divorced while writing this book, plus her father committed suicide. Okay, so 18 months have passed since the end of the last book, but there was never any sign of this earlier. It was a shock to discover at the start of this book that Maddy's husband Dean, who has always been such a honey, has turned into a complaining, high-handed creep. I feel as if Read started off writing edgy crime stories with a funny, foul-mouthed heroine who was pretty much unputdownable, and has veered off into personal angst with a large dash of bitterness. I would like to be Winston Churchill when I grow up. I am also the grateful recipient of a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Field was nominated for seven awards, including the Edgar for best first novel.

I have now published two novels, A Field of Darkness and The Crazy School. The Rolling Stones doing 'King Bee' gets an honorable mention.

#VALLEY OF ASHES MOVIE#

My two favorite songs are Patsy Cline's 'Sweet Dreams' and that little bit of Bach Glenn Gould plays right when the Tralfamadorians are coming out of the stars to kidnap Billy Pilgrim and his old dog Spot in the movie version of Slaughterhouse Five.

I subscribe to my sister's gustatory philosophy, which is that 'there are two kinds of food in the world: food that's good, and food that needs more salt.' I like to read a lot, being especially fond of the backs of cereal boxes and badly garbled assembly instructions written by persons for whom English is not the language of choice (although my all-time favorite bit of writing was contained in the song list on a bootleg Dylan tape in Hong Kong, which claimed 'Bowling in the Wind' was the first cut on side A).įor the last several generations, my family's motto has been 'Never a Dull Moment.' None of us know how you would say this in Latin. I am the world's worst housewife, nicknamed by my intrepid spouse 'a lighting rod for entropy in the universe.' I am now at home molding the characters (evil laugh here) of my twin daughters, the younger of whom has severe autism. My childhood mentors included Sufis, surfers, single moms, Black Panthers, Ansel Adams, draft dodgers, striking farmworkers, and Henry Miller's toughest ping-pong rival. I was subsequently raised near Big Sur by divorced hippie-renegade parents. I know old-school WASP culture firsthand, having been born into the tenth (and last) generation of my mother's family to live on Oyster Bay's Centre Island. I was born in Manhattan, and spent my childhood racketing around from New York to California to Oahu. I have circumnavigated the globe, throwing up in many of the world's airports as I hate to fly.

Valley of ashes