… The Collected Works of Gretchen Oyster has two voices…. CA: And have you ever switched points of view while drafting…?ĬF: I did that for an adult novel. Some stories, I feel, have to be in third person because the character just doesn’t have the sort of voice where he or she could tell her story, even if it’s to an imaginary reader. … I definitely love to think about what that relationship is.

I love thinking about the relationship between the voice of the book and the reader because really, that is your point of intimacy, of contact, is that voice. CA: Have you had a narrator who talks directly to the reader?ĬF: Yes.

Danny who Fell in a Hole opens with … “’It’s really nothing to worry about,’ Danny’s mother said.” …So yes, I have opened with dialogue. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.CF: Yes. With its innovative structure, masterful prose, and intelligently crafted characters, this book illustrates how we are shaped by―and can eventually overcome―the constraints of the times we occupy. The Student is a compassionate and compelling work of fiction that brings together two pivotal times in history. It had been familiar and strange, embarrassing and exhilarating, and she had wondered what the young person who had written all these words had to do with the old woman who read them now. In the days leading up to the wedding, she had deciphered every word of marginalia in her young, minuscule handwriting. She climbs the stairs to her study to look at a book she had carried with her forty-eight years earlier, on a bus to the United States. When the young man abandons her to join the movement back home, Miriam gets on a bus to follow him, no longer sure of anything in her lifeĪUGUST 21, 2005: It is the morning of Miriam’s son’s wedding (a newly-legal, same-sex marriage). Unsure of how to break a path for herself, she begins a reckless affair with an American student obsessed with the civil rights clashes in the south―specifically in Little Rock, where public schools had been desegregated. But then, in a single moment, her dreams crumble around her as she realizes that―as a woman―the obstacles to achieving what she wants could be unsurmountable. She is a serious and passionate student of literature who studies hard, dates a young Jewish man with a good job, and is the apple of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s. LATE SUMMER - AUTUMN, 1957: Miriam Moscowitz is starting her final year of university with unwavering ambition. The Student is a portrait of a life in two snapshots: 1957, 2005

The Student by Cary Fagan