Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys come back to life to help a hapless modern day writer rewrite herself in love and work.
The title harkens back to Duras' novel and film, "Destroy, she said". Mira, the main character, a writer, has a kind of magical realism experience with these two 20th century writers who come back to life as she steps through a mirrored glass to meet Jean Rhys in a bar and Marguerite Duras on a park bench. With ethereal credit cards they whisk her off to Vienna to heal that Jewish heritage, to teach her about life, love and writing, and to open her to new love with an oboe player. It's as though they want her to know that love comes and goes, experiment, don't be afraid, but all the while keep perfecting the craft of the writing, what Walley exudes as, "The private lives of sentences."
quote: These women are insistent. And why are they helping me, I wondered. Was a returning Dickens arriving right now in Los Angeles to help Robert Ludlum? He didn't seem to need much help. Tolstoy must have come and gone in helping David Grossman, his last novel had the Russian genius' imprimatur. Who is Virginia Woolf with right now? [...] And if that is not the immediate case, then why have they chosen me out of all the writers, so many of us now, clicking away at laptops, even phones? I decided, and perhaps this speaks more of my personality than truth, that they chose me because I was a particular brand of nomad, like them. I was not an intellectual in the Upper West Side academic sense. I had always been on the margins, hurt, a stranger in a strange land, like they (émigrés), rejected by parents, longing, longing for love, and this, this had been our material. Also their careers were saved at the last minute, and so perhaps they chose me for that hopeful ending.
Author Biography:
Jacqueline Gay Walley, under the pen name Gay Walley, has been publishing short stories since 1988 and published her first novel, Strings Attached, with U Press of Mississippi (1999), which was a Finalist for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner Award and earned a Writer's Voice Capricorn Award and the Paris Book Festival Award. the erotic fire of the unattainable: aphorisms on love, art and the vicissitudes of life was published by IML Publications, in 2007 and was reissued by Skyhorse Publishing 2015. This book, the erotic fire of the unattainable was a finalist for the Paris Book Festival Award and from this, she wrote a screenplay for the film, The Unattainable Story (2016) with actor, Harry Hamlin, which premiered at the Mostra Film Festival in Sao Paolo, Brazil. From this same book, Walley adapted a screenplay for director Frank Vitale's docufiction feature film, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Longing to be Found (2020), which was featured in Brooklyn Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival in San Jose, ReadingFilmFest, American Fringe in Paris. Her novel, Lost in Montreal (2013) was published by Incanto Press, along with the novel, Duet, which was written with Kurt Haber. Walley's e-books, How to Write Your First Novel, Save Your One Person Business from Extinction, and The Smart Guide to Business Writing are featured on Bookboon, as well, How to Keep Calm and Carry on without Money and How to be Beautiful with amazon.com. In 2013, her play Love, Genius and a Walk opened in the Midtown Festival, New York, and was nominated for 6 awards including best playwright, in 2018, it also played in London at The Etcetera Theatre above The Oxford Arms pub as well as at three other pub theatres. It is scheduled to open September 2021 at Theatro Techni in London. October 2021, Jacqueline Gay Walley's 6 novel Venus as She Ages Collection: Strings Attached (second edition, under her pen name, Gay Walley), To Any Lengths, Prison Sex, The Bed You Lie In, Write She Said, and Magnetism is being launched worldwide through IML Publications, distributed by Ingram.
