Today, we continue our guest blog post from AuthorHouse’s Mitzi Mensch, self-published author of The Dangers of Kissing and Diet Coke; Goldie, My First Love; Return Receipt Requested; and Goldie, My Last Love. You can read the first part of Mitzi’s post in our Author Blogs section. This time, she tells us about her literary influences. Read on!
First of all I want to thank Erica Jong for writing Fear of Flying. She is the one who got me to start writing seriously. I figured if she could do it, I could too (but then she never did it again).
Autobiographical writers, I believe, are the best, because they write of true emotions. Charles Bukowski is my favorite writer in that regard. He just wrote it all down. There it is, like it or not, it’s what he wrote, vulgar and crude. Women was my favorite; it read like a poem, raw in its reality, a rhythm to each chapter, each woman a different stanza, each story the same.
And then there was Leonard Bishop, a writer dear to my heart. He was raised in New York in a world of abject poverty and violence, and wrote about it in his first novel, Down All Your Streets. He told me once, “The only honest thing I ever did was write.” He told me that in a private writing group he led, a group I was privileged to belong to, to know such a man.
More recently I have related to Philip Roth with The Human Stain and The Dying Animal. I will say, though, that none of his work matches Portnoy’s Complaint in its explicit sexual irreverence that is ashamedly, yet truthfully, universally relatable. Is that what makes it his masterpiece?
I especially liked John Updike’s Rabbit quartet, knowing Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through his years and mine, as well as through societal changes of the times. I read Couples shortly after the Kennedy baby’s birth and death, the time frame around which this novel was centered, Patrick’s short life giving detail to the period. The time capsule is enhanced by other current events of the day, in particular the emergence of ‘The Pill’ which provided for promiscuity among the couples depicted.
By following writers I get the bildungsroman (a novel dealing with one’s formative years or education) effect of the author through their characters. I would like the same to be said of Mitzi Mensch.
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For more information about Mitzi and her books, visit her website at www.mitzimensch.com. All of her books are available in the AuthorHouse Bookstore.
Check back later in the week for the continuation of Mitzi’s guest blog post, and again on Friday for our introduction to science fiction writing. Thanks for visiting Author’s Digest!
