Lucy Ferriss - Spring and Other Disturbances

With Rilla Askew and Mary Kay Zuravleff at the Authors Guild Gala

Read Past Newsletters

"Ferriss strikes the perfect balance between the global and the personal." -- Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

Spring and Other Disturbances

The Douro Valley of Portugal

May 15, 2022

Dear friends,

What a long, strange trip it's been, this spring of 2022. I've been blessed with more than two solid months of spring, from the daffodils in Paris in early March right through to the blooming dogwood now in Connecticut. Local asparagus and local strawberries graced the table in the Garonne in early April, and they're just hitting the markets now in New England. I made serious inroads on three book projects while in residence at the Moulin à Nef, then hit the road with Don for two weeks through Spain and Portugal before catching a flight from Toulouse to St. Louis, Missouri, for my 50th high school reunion. If you haven't had yours yet, I would say: Don't miss it. The cast of characters is unexpected and great material for fiction, and at this milestone, classmates also make a bad habit of dying.

The world hasn't had such a great spring. Rounding a corner in Valladolid, Spain, we came upon a large group of citizens clapping and thought there might be a wedding or a demonstration. But no – they were sending off four vans full of volunteers with Doctors without Borders, who would put their lives on the line to help the people of Ukraine. The news from that war is wrenching and shows no signs of letting up. It also serves, or should serve, as a clarion call to us here in the States to defend our own democracy.

Literature and politics are always intertwining. On Saturday, May 14, I marched with perhaps 50,000 others across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the actions that the six conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court seem about to take, not only to overturn Roe v. Wade, but also to peel back all the rights we have won over the last 50 years based on a right to privacy in our lives. As I mentioned in this newsletter a few months ago, I foresaw this moment 25 years ago when I wrote The Misconceiver. Now I am selling off my stash of that unfortunately prescient novel and donating the proceeds to the National Abortion Rights Action League. If you want to participate, just go to Amazon, click "2 New from $7.00" and order from Lucy Ferriss Books. Thus far, I am donating $150; I'd love to see that amount grow. If you disagree, please don't unsubscribe. Let me know how you feel, and why. We all need to talk to each other more about the things that matter.

Among the strange swerves of spring 2022, I found that U.S.-owned airlines were no longer requiring masks or vaccines, even on international flights. The announcement begs passengers to be respectful of one another. Metro-North requires masks on its trains but the conductors don't enforce the mandate because of aggressive noncompliant riders. Meanwhile, several cases of Covid arose during my residence in France and from the partying at the 50th in St. Louis. It's exhausting, isn't it? I hope everyone is staying safe. In case you're quarantined, or in case you just want to be lounging outside with a good book, I recommend Anthony Doerr's bedazzling, ambitious Cloud Cuckoo Land. Or if you're in the mood for shorter slices of fiction, you can still pick up my collection, Foreign Climes, wherever books are sold.

Slava Ukraini and may summer bring us all relief!

Lucy