Sue Miller biography

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Sue Miller
Photo: Debi Milligan

Sue Miller

Sue Miller Biography

Both critically acclaimed and loved by readers, Sue Miller is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986), the first of her ten novels, was an immediate bestseller (more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts). Subsequent novels include three Book-of- the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah's Book Club selection), and The Senator's Wife. Her latest novel is The Arsonist. Her nonfiction book, The Story of My Father, was heralded by BookPage as a "beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer's disease." Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. She is a committed advocate for the writer's engagement with society at large, having held a position on the Board of PEN-American Center. For four years she was Chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT.



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Interview

Sue Miller discusses her various books and shares her thoughts on such topics as the institution of marriage and how people (feminists in particular) have responded to her various works.

Since The Good Mother was published in 1986, your novels have chronicled a tumultuous time in American family life. What's drawn you to this material?
Probably the tumult itself. I think it's fair to say that's what a fiction writer is most often drawn to -- tumult of one kind or another; and in that sense the family in the last quarter century seems to me to be among the most fascinating of human social or economic inventions--more than business or real estate, no matter what Tom Wolfe says, more than the church or the law or the hospital. It is of course, open to and impinged on by all of those -- another great draw for the writer -- and also by belief and passion and irrationality and need.

It seems both more fragile and more important an institution than it ever has been, more multifarious, more invented as it goes along, more necessary. It's been too easily dismissed as the subject or setting for serious fiction; American fiction in particular was for a while pleased to think it had moved beyond the family, left it behind as a kind of low topic, suited only to women and children. But it comes around, again and again, as it has throughout fiction's history.

You have been ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Sue Miller at BookBrowse
Monogamy jacket The Arsonist jacket The Lake Shore Limited jacket The Senator's Wife jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Sue Miller but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Elizabeth Berg

    Elizabeth Berg

    Elizabeth Berg is the author of many bestselling novels, including Open House (an Oprah's Book Club selection), Talk Before Sleep, and The Year of Pleasures, as well as the short story collection The Day I Ate Whatever I... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Lost In The Forest

    Try:
    The Year of Pleasures
    by Elizabeth Berg

  • Ethan Canin

    Ethan Canin

    Highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, Ethan Canin has ranged in his career from the short stories of Emperor of the Air to the novellas of The Palace Thief, from the short novel Carry Me Across the ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Lost In The Forest

    Try:
    America America
    by Ethan Canin

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