The Writer Laid Bare

In the autumn of 2008 I was approaching the fifth anniversary of my writer’s block. During those years I never stopped writing and sometimes even produced publishable works. However, writing had become much harder than it used to be and …

“I don’t look poor, so everyone believes I’m wealthy,” my grandmother said to me one day. And it was true.  She wore beautiful fabrics and her hair was always set. Chic, I think, would be a word you’d use to …

Six months after giving birth to my second child, blogging now feels just as exhilarating and subversive as sneaking out of the house after 6pm with a small handbag that contains no nappies. Ah, the extravagant (guilty) pleasures of early …

Some memoirs are written from the bottom of a heart that has been burdened with an unresolved story. Such was my memoir, Dora B (reprinted with a new title, My Mother Was a Bag Lady), in which I wrote …

When internationally renowned Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld was barely nine years old, he escaped a Nazi concentration camp in Romania, surviving by moving from one hiding place to another for the next three years. As an adult, still haunted by …

Travel has always inspired writing, and the two share a symbiotic relationship. There is something about being away from home which inspires a mania for recording events and impressions. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that this is, in all likelihood, a …