Author Maxine Rosaler

Maxine Rosaler - Quick Facts

• Favorite Activity (not related to writing): Swimming
• Favorite place to go when thinking through a plot issue or book idea:
  Sitting on my son's bed with my laptop.
• Favorite Author: John Cheever
• Favorite Books: The Short Stories of John Cheever, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Favorite Movie: Now Voyager (because it reminds me of my mother)
• Favorite Pastime: Lying bed at night with husband watching television.
• Favorite Speech and why: From "For God's sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings..." to "How can you say to me I am a king?" Act 3, scene 2, Richard II. This is a wonderful tragic poem that expresses the character of a particular person yet speaks profoundly to all our lives.
• What do you most like about being an author: Writing, when it is going well, makes me feel complete peace. I love swimming around in my unconscious mind and letting the ideas flow and then pummeling sentences into shape. I am in love with words. I couldn't live without writing. (That's not to say there aren't moments of hell, when I feel like tearing my brain out of my skull.)

Interesting Highlights

Do you teach on a specific topic? 

No.

What specialized knowledge do you have?

I suppose I could say that since I have been the mother of a child with autism for twenty years I am pretty well-acquainted with the ugly politics of fighting for the rights of a disabled child.

Do you, as an author, provide in-depth research on a topic?

Sometimes I will interview people to flesh out a character. And if I want to add some details to a scene I will do research for that as well, either using books or the internet or doing interviews or going to a particular place. Like once I went with my-then-boyfriend, now-husband, Phillip, to 42nd Street to research a story I was working on, part of which was set on 42nd Street in the days before Rudolph Guiliani Disneyfied it, and we went to a porn place called Show World and when we were leaving one of their famous "Chicks with Dicks" asked Phil if I was "real."

What else do you want to share?

I used to write nonfiction young adult books for a living. The Devil on Trial (Houghton-Mifflin), which I wrote in collaboration with my husband, Phillip Margulies, and Coping with Asperger Syndrome, which I wrote as a book-for-hire, are two I will mention here.

I was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship

Current Project

What are you working on now . . . I'm having a lot of fun working on a literary thriller.