Last Thursday, a sizeable crowd gathered in the Reading Room of the Mandel Center for the Humanities to listen to novelist Linda Schlossberg '91 read from her first novel, Life in Miniature, at a School of Night event, a series of seminars co-sponsored by the Mandel Center and the Creative Writing program. Schlossberg-currently the assistant director of Harvard University's Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program-majored in both English and American Literature and Women's and Gender Studies while at Brandeis and went on to receive a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard. During the event, she read some captivating passages from her novel, talked about the coming-of-age genre of literature along with Prof. John Plotz (ENG) and also provided an insider's look at a career in writing while fielding questions from the audience. After an introduction by Plotz, who has known the novelist since soon after she left Brandeis, Schlossberg began by giving the audience some background information on her novel. Life in Miniature is narrated by Adie, a young girl living in California in the early 1980s, who returns home from school to find that her mother has suffered a nervous breakdown. The novel centers on Adie; her older sister, Miriam; and their mother, Mindy. Schlossberg described their mother's paranoia as being largely rooted in the cultural fears of drug use and abuse, anxieties that were prevalent in the early 1980s. As the novel progresses, Adie must learn to see the world for herself, according to her own thoughts and not according to her mother's delusional imagination.

Schlossberg's use of a combination of wit and the present tense makes for a very engaging novel. She transported the audience to Adie's world of a small girl living in the 1980s who is on her journey toward coming of age. The present tense lends to the portrayal of Adie's keen perceptiveness. Adie's detailed accounts of the sights and sounds around her give her descriptions a certain degree of tangibility. Schlossberg told the audience that she started writing the novel in the present tense and had experimented with changing the tense but noticed that doing so changed Adie's voice too drastically. She said that she "figured out Adie's voice very early in the writing process, and knew she was the one to tell the story."

Plotz started the discussion after the reading by commenting on Schlossberg's "incredible use of comic lines . in a situation that's inherently unfunny." Schlossberg maintains that she does not think of the novel as comic. Nevertheless, laughter erupted from the audience after moments such as when Adie describes an earthquake drill and talks about having to crawl under a desk, explaining that "usually there's gum stuck under the desk, and it gets tangled in [her] hair." She humorously follows by expressing that,"The only way to get it out is with peanut butter, which is worth it even if it makes your hair smell like a sandwich."

As part of the discussion, Schlossberg gave the audience an insider's perspective of the writing process and the journey to the publication of her novel. When asked to discuss her revision process, she first simply said, laughing, "It's endless." Indeed, Schlossberg expressed the time and hard work that it took to get her novel published. "For most writers," she said, "the journey from idea to publication is a very long one. You have to have a lot of patience, and you really have to love writing, because finishing a novel is going to take a long time. I was lucky enough to have a really supportive writing group, and I shared many drafts of the novel with them before I sent it out."

Schlossberg had many inspiring words for the people in the audience, which was comprised of many students who are currently enrolled in creative writing workshops and who are aspiring writers. She took a short fiction seminar during her senior year at Brandeis, and it was her first writing class and her first-ever experience with creative writing. "I realized right away that I loved writing. It opened up a whole new world to me." .