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Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of a variety of novels, children's books and non-fiction titles. Her third adult novel Breaking the Bank - about a woman who finds an ATM that hands out extra money - has just been released. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two children. (Interview by Angela Smith)
A conversation with my brother in which I told him about the time a bank teller gave me $400 extra. Receiving that "found" money was a rush, let me tell you. But I returned it right away. And the teller was so grateful; turns out it was her first week on the job and she would have been fired had she been $400 short. But the incident led me to think about how things were so different now. What if it had been an ATM that gave me the money? Much harder to assign responsibility - or blame - to a machine, right? So this set me thinking ...
Well, if I were Mia, I would probably do pretty much what she did.
I'm a pretty practical sort of person at heart. I'd pay off my mortgage, re-do my kitchen, send a chunk to charity. Then, depending on what was left, I'd take my daughter (not quite 14) to Paris.
I'd love for them to have a sense of the book's magic, that feeling that sometimes, something wholly unexpected can swoop down and turn your life around.
Brooklyn is no better than any other place; it's just that it is the place I have called home for the last 17 years, and so it felt easy, natural and right to set my book here.
I love the energy, the diversity, and the sense of possibility that exists here.
No, that was a desire that evolved in my mid-20s.
I took so much from that experience, despite the fact that I never danced professionally. The sense of discipline, the ability to persevere and the willingness to tolerate delayed gratification: all these things came from my ballet training.
The protagonist is a failed dancer - her description, her perception. She danced professionally for many years but never made it out of the corps de ballet. When she left, she was bitter and disillusioned. Eventually, she built a modest, circumscribed and very solitary life for herself. She is content, not wanting or seeking more. But her younger sister dies quite suddenly, leaving three young children. Now this former dancer must deal with the new and unfamiliar demands being placed on her. How much does she owe these children? How much can she give without losing herself? These are the things she is forced to confront.
Oh, it's a long list. I think that different authors speak to us at different times in our lives.
See above. In my youth, I would have said Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables or Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Later, I might have said Dolores Haze in Lolita or Rosalind in As You Like It.
I've always loved Barbie, and when I learned, to my utter dismay, that there was a kind of Barbie backlash, I was moved to write an essay about her that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1998. There was a lot of response to the piece and I realized that there was a book there.
It came out of my own love of dolls and dollhouses, both as a child and as an adult. I have a wonderful dollhouse now that my husband built for me. It's filled with doll furniture that I saved from my own childhood.
Everything and anything. Books, movies, snippets of conversations, bits of partially remembered dreams, early memories of childhood ... Writers are like blue jays: thieves gathering together all the little bits and scraps that somehow come together to form a story, a life, an entire world.