Alice Hoffman's Blog

The woman in history who has meant the most to me was a thirteen year-old girl when she began the diary about which John Kennedy wrote, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spo

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...

My new novel The Story Sisters is about the power of stories and the complications of family connections and family mythologies.

In the new paperback release of my novel THIRD ANGEL there is a new section included that wasn't in the original hardback edition-- the book written by one of the characters, a children's book titled "The Heron's Wife" -- since my character was a writer, it seemed only fair that readers got to read her book since I refer to it in my own book.Now, in my new novel, THE STORY SISTERS, ...

Is Fiction Hazardous to Your Health??? Is it better to read your way through life, or to live it? One writer asked this question recently and seemed to find that the answer was that fiction had in some ways ruined her for real life, and that Wuthering Heights in particular had made real life unsatisfactory, second-rate. Well, I have my own opinions about Wuthering Heights (see my intro in the ...

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...

Although my novels aren’t autobiographical The Third Angel began with a ghostly experience in a London hotel, which you can read about at my website . As a writer, I use fiction to escape – I write for the same reasons I read, to enter into another world. But in The Third Angel the pieces of my life are scattered throughout – the books and people ...

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 ...

I’ll be at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on Sunday April 27th, at UCLA on a panel to discuss magic and literature at 12:00. The panel is called Magic in Everyday Life with authors Aimee Bender, Alex Espinoza, and Yxta Maya Murray. My individual reading is at 3 of the same day and I’ll be reading from my new novel. The Third Angel. Please come if you’re in LA --- I can’t wait to ...

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...