Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Barbara Bourland is the author of the critically acclaimed I'll Eat When I'm Dead, a Refinery29 Best Book of 2017 and an Irish Independent Book of the Year. People called I'll Eat When I'm Dead "delectable." Wednesday Martin, bestselling author of Primates of Park Avenue and Untrue, deemed it "a deft, smart, and hilarious debut." Kirkus Reviews noted that "death by beauty was never so much fun," and the book was featured in Fortune, US Weekly, and The New York Post, among others.
Her second novel, Fake Like Me, was written with support from The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY, where Bourland was a resident over the winter of 2017-2018.
Bourland is a former freelance writer and web producer for titles at Condé Nast and Hearst, among others. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and dog.
Barbara Bourland's website
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While both of your novels share your incisive wit and flair for vivid detail, Fake Like Me is a very different book from your debut, I'll Eat When I'm Dead. What brought you to this particular story? Are there ways in which you see this as a continued exploration of a certain theme in your work, or are you just following your creative instincts wherever they take you?
The tones are of course quite different, as each book matches [its]tone to the subject material. Personally, I see more similarities than differences: Both books are about women's work; women's bodies; women's selves as self. My work focuses on women as we stand, not in terms of our relationships to others (mother, wife, daughter, etc.). Both novels focus extensively on the costs of our lives. In terms of IEWID, I don't want to know what makes a beautiful woman "feel beautiful"; I want to know how much it costs her. It's the same with Fake Like Me: I don't want to hear some lyrical romantic fairytale about women's artwork. I want to know how hard it was. How much does making a painting as big as Joan Mitchell's or Helen Frankenthaler's cost a person, exactly? What does it cost to be ourselves?
One of the most unforgettably immersive parts of this book is the way ...
Joel Dicker was born in 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied law. He spent childhood summers in New England, particularly in Stonington and Bar Harbor, Maine. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair won three French... (more)
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Myla Goldberg is a bestselling novelist, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and recipient of a ... (more)
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