Marisa Silver Revisits the Golden Dawn of Girlhood

The Author of The Mysteries in Conversation with Jane Ciabattari

By Jane Ciabattari

In a series of imaginative and insightful novels, Marisa Silver has explored the impact of collateral damage, in life as well as in war, and illuminated the lives of characters with the courage to face their troubles. In Mary Coin, she fictionalized the migrant mother in the iconic Dorothea Lange photograph. (“Silver unleashes a kaleidoscope of images, then slows down long enough for us to absorb the emotional resonance of each,” I wrote when I named it to my BBC Culture Best of 2013 list. “Most surprising is Mary Coin’s late-life recognition of what the portrait—‘frozen into an indelible past like an insult you can never take back’—means to the world outside her own.”)

Silver delved into fairytale-like transformations of the female body in Little Nothing (2016) and followed the journey of 12-year-old Ares and his younger brother, who live on the dangerous edge of the Salton Sea, in The God of War (2008).

Her new novel, The Mysteries, delineates the effect of an indelible tragedy on several families with a relatively realistic tone.

“I never begin by thinking ‘I want to write a piece of realism’ or ‘I want to write something that bends toward the surreal,’” she explains. Read the full conversation of Lit Hub.