Posts by Anita Diamant
The Last Session (with my therapist)
Four months ago, my therapist told me she would be retiring this summer. I was taken aback –a phrase that suddenly made perfect sense to me since I felt as though I had been physically moved without my consent. In a way, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. We had been slowing…
Read MoreThe Boston Girl
It’s done. The Boston Girl, my fifth novel and twelfth book, has been submitted, accepted and copyedited. Publication date: December 9, 2014. It’s a historical novel told in the first person by an eighty-five-year-old woman named Addie Baum in response to a question from her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter who wants to know how she came to…
Read MoreWhat were they thinking?
I just received copies of my novel DAY AFTER NIGHT in Russian. I believe this is the first of my books translated into the language of Dostoyevsky. I wonder if the designers or editors even glanced at what’s inside because this image is so profoundly odd. Sure, the sky is ominous but four happy gals…
Read MoreOn the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings
In the long, sad run-up to the 2014 running of the Boston Marathon, I’ve been thinking about the families of the four people who died. The youngest was a baby, only eight years old, standing near the finish line with his family. The oldest was a twenty-nine-year-old woman with an impish smile and a reputation…
Read MoreFinishing the Hat
I’m close to finishing the book. I think so. No, really, I am. Maybe. It looks good. I don’t know. I think I can, I think I can. Somebody shoot me. Or get me some uppers. I had an anxiety dream a few nights ago. I was onstage in the final moments of a big…
Read MoreBoston: My Home Town. Sort of.
I have to admit that I felt a little bit like a wedding crasher at the inaugural ceremony for Mayor Marty Walsh on January 6. You see, I live in Newton, a city that only shares a border with Boston proper — and apparently, a small portion of Boston College. But I wanted to be…
Read MoreCall me Schnorrer
The Yiddish word, schnorrer has more than one meaning. It can be used to describe a habitual moocher, someone who never picks up the check, or a low-level jerk, a no-goodnik. However, the first definition in most dictionaries is “beggar.” There are all kinds of schnorrers: panhandlers on the street, the kid who knocks on…
Read MoreNelson Mandela
He was a big talker, the driver who drove my husband and me from the airport in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to an inland game reserve. He told us that he was originally from Zimbabwe but moved to South Africa many years prior when things got bad for whites under the Mugabe regime. We exchanged…
Read MoreThe words to say it
Thanks by W. S. Merwin Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking…
Read MoreGobble Tov
Every autumn, as sure as the leaves change color, the Jews will be kvetching about the timing of our holidays: too early, with Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, hard on the heels of Labor Day; or too late, so that Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement, when synagogues are packed to the rafters — coincides with…
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