Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications.

Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Her new novel is Animal Instinct.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Shearn's reply:

I tend to read several books at once, which confounds my friends who are more organized readers. Right now it happens to be:

Lifesaving, a memoir by Judith Barrington published in 2000. I teach personal essay and memoir-writing, and I often use Barrington's writing about writing memoir, but it only recently occurred to me to read her actual memoir! This is a gorgeous and thoughtful book about the aftermath of her parents' sudden death when she was 19 -- she expatriated to Spain, had some adventures, and started to come to terms with her sexuality and queerness. It's every bit as good as her craft writing would suggest!

Hot Air, a brand new novel by Marcy Dermansky. I've just started this one -- it has the same pub day as Animal Instinct, and Marcy and I are doing an event together. I've long been a fan of her eccentric and hilarious books (I teach parts of The Red Car in my "Writing for Women on the Verge" class), and am always excited to dive into another one. In this book, a divorced woman's first date is interrupted by billionaires crashing their hot air balloon, which just feels so very now, doesn't it? Marcy and I were just texting about how our novels have weirdly similar lines in them about some of the darker aspects of marriage; I love that we were somehow on a similar wavelength but ended up with such different fictional iterations of midlife rebirth stories.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. I felt like a re-read of a classic was in order, and as one of the original Women on the Verge novels, this felt like a good one to revisit. I first read it in college, and related so much to Jane, and was so hot for Mr Rochester -- I imagine I'm going to have a really different reaction on this read. So far it's really fun. What a narrative voice!

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct.

--Marshal Zeringue