"Look over my shoulder"

– Rucha Bhawkar. Dear Rucha it would be easier to list what hasn’t changed since I started out, more than thirty years ago. Just thinking about it makes me feel so old! I don’t want…Continue Reading: «How is it different when you began writing, and today?»

…the experience that counts when you want to write?» – Sethulakshmi Oh, dear Sethulakshmi! I feel like I am answering every single question with «both». But it’s true, it’s both. But even «both» is not…Continue Reading: «Is it really the writer’s imagination or…

«Or giving happiness to others and not being contended by everything in our lives?» – Ena. Oh, Ena! That is such a good question. If I think about it, it is the central question that…Continue Reading: «Does happiness lie in living for ourselves?»

… in the recent past. How do you look at your own situation, a Swiss author living in and writing from America?» – Dr Swati Acharaya, Pune. Thank you for this question, Dr Acharaya. It…Continue Reading: «Homeland and mother tongue have become very fluid terms …

Why would you do that to yourself? Why seek out happy couples – couples that seem happy to you at least – after a painful divorce? Not many of my friends understood. I was not…Continue Reading: The Happy-Couples-Cure for Heartbreak.

Here I was, 21 years old, on a train ride from Paris to Munich where my father was dying in a huge hospital. I distracted myself by writing – the novel I had started on…Continue Reading: The Impostor’s School of Writing, part 2

I was 21 and living in Paris when I first started telling people that I was a writer. Until then I had never said it out loud. Somehow I had met a group of aspiring…Continue Reading: The Impostor’s School of Writing – Part 1