Suzanne Myers

Suzanne Myers was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Toronto, Canada. She is a graduate of Princeton University and USC Film School. Her feature film Alchemy won Best Feature at the SXSW Film Festival. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two sons, and dogs. She also rides and shows horses.

Myers's latest novel is I'm From Nowhere.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I read constantly. Possibly too much. I often think I should slow down and take longer breaks between books, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I read a lot of YA, both contemporary and classic, and a lot of literary fiction, also contemporary and classic. I’m a terrible non-fiction reader. And I have to be basically obsessed with someone to read his or her biography. Right now, the Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, is on my nightstand, and she definitely qualifies.

The most recent YA novel I read was Libba Bray’s The Diviners, which I loved. She paints a fantastic world: New York in the roaring twenties, with a heavy dose of dark magic. I was particularly impressed with the way she wove the stories of such a diverse group of characters together and was adept at keeping so many balls in the air. The book is inventive, well researched and a lot of fun to read.

I like to go back and reread books I haven’t looked at for a while, or find lesser-known works by authors I like that I’ve overlooked. Recently I’ve been on a big Daphne du Maurier and Josephine Tey kick. Both wrote in the middle of the 20th century and I don’t think either was taken as seriously as she should have been at the time. Du Maurier was considered a romance novelist and Tey a mystery writer, but really they both specialized in the creepy and unexpected. The books I just read were du Maurier’s The Scapegoat and Tey’s Brat Farrar. Both novels are about doubles and imposters, my absolute favorite kind of story. Du Maurier also wrote wonderful shorts stories, and many great movies have been adapted from her work: Rebecca, The Birds and Don't Look Now are standouts.

Much of my reading actually takes the form of listening. When an audiobook is cast well, the performance adds tremendously. One actor I love to hear is Jane Entwistle, who reads all of Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first in the series. Flavia is a madcap eleven-year-old who lives in a decaying, ancient English manor and delights in chemistry and murder. I can’t think of her without hearing Jane Entwistle’s beguiling voice.

Visit Suzanne Myers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue