Nicola has recently published her new novel, Always, and it rocks. Find out more here. Get it at your local bookstore or on amazon.
Next on her horizon: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a fabulous thing: a memoir of Nicola’s childhood and early adult life with emphasis on how she became a writer – the events, people, feelings, challenges, fears and joys that led her to the work.
It’s more than a book (although there are over 45,000 words of text): it’s a beautifully designed object, a box of Nicola that includes several small volumes, photographs, juvenilia (Christmas lists, an early poem, her first crayon-drawn book), reproduced diary entries, a CD of songs with her band… and more.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Imagine that someone hands you a small box, perhaps like the cigar boxes of my youth in which kids saved their most precious objects. And in the box is a story in many dimensions, multiple media, so many different ways to experience the memories and feelings and thoughts of the person herself… I think it’s seriously cool, and I think it may well set a new paradigm for memoir. [Edited in 2009 to add: And I’m apparently not the only folks who think so. ANWAGTHAP won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for memoir.]
But hurry: it’s a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, and that’s all there will ever be.