What is Marcella Pixley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Marcella Pixley, author of Ready to Fall.

Her entry begins:

As a writer, I often read in order to teach myself something I want to master. I look for writers whose work contains some aspect of a strategy or structure I am trying to hone in my own fiction and then I devour everything I can find that will teach me what I want to learn from them. Most recently, I have been in love with Elizabeth Strout’s writing, and over the past months, I have poured through each of her novels, underlining passages, re-reading pages and trying to learn what she is doing to make her characters shine the way they do. I appreciate the way she shows how fragile we are as human beings. She captures the imperfection of our love for each other, and how desperately we yearn to connect with the people in our families and our communities who matter most to us. Strout is a master at creating silent tensions between her characters, demonstrating...[read on]

About Ready to Fall, from the publisher:

A young adult novel about a teen who finds hope and a fresh start after a terrible loss, and learns that being strong means letting go.

When Max Friedman’s mother dies of cancer, instead of facing his loss, Max imagines that her tumor has taken up residence in his brain. It's a terrible tenant—isolating him from family, distracting him in school, and taunting him mercilessly about his manhood. With the tumor in charge, Max implodes, slipping farther and farther away from reality.

Finally, Max is sent to the artsy, off-beat Baldwin School to regain his footing. He joins a group of theater misfits in a steam-punk production of Hamlet where he becomes friends with Fish, a girl with pink hair and a troubled past, and The Monk, an edgy upperclassman who refuses to let go of the things he loves. For a while, Max almost feels happy. But his tumor is always lurking in the wings—until one night it knocks him down and Max is forced to face the truth, not just about the tumor, but about how hard it is to let go of the past. At turns lyrical, haunting, and triumphant, Ready to Fall is a story of grief, love, rebellion and starting fresh from acclaimed author Marcella Pixley.

Visit Marcella Pixley's website.

My Book, The Movie: Ready to Fall.

Writers Read: Marcella Pixley.

--Marshal Zeringue