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Instead of reading from one of her two novels—Frequency of Souls (1996) and The Bowl is Already Broken (2006)—Zuravleff informed the audience that she would take a risky move and read from an unfinished novel-in-progress. Here’s the synopsis: a family goes to Rehoboth Beach for summer break, and the father, a pediatric psychopharmacologist, is sent to the hospital after being struck by lightning. The novel follows the different members of the family as they come to terms with their father’s terrible accident.

 

Reading from the point of view of one of the sons, Zurvaleff went through the events of a night in which he almost loses his dad and then goes on to lose his virginity. “What sort of person excuses himself from a family crisis to get laid?” the writer challenged us, but as she continued to read, Zuravleff offered great insight into the complex effects that simultaneous love and tragedy would have on a teenager.

The writer emphasized the warm, stale summers at Rehoboth beach and the accompanying food—warm caramel drizzled over popcorn, homemade fudge, cotton candy freshly spun, doughy pizza crusts tossed. When reading the pivotal sex scene, Zuravleff joked with the audience. While fanning herself with her papers, she asked, “Is it just me or is it getting hot in here?”

The reading ended with a Q&A session. Zurvaleff discussed the numerous challenges of writing a novel and compared writing books to solving puzzles. Once you reach the end, she said, you have to keep going back to rearrange it. She also noted that a title is extremely difficult to find, and that she didn’t have one yet for this novel-in-progress. “Want to give it a title?” she offered to one student. “I’ll buy you a beer or a coke.”

Mary Kay Zuravleff

The Writing Seminars Reading Series

Johns Hopkins University

3400 N Charles Street

Baltimore, MD

by Alyssa Hawn

Alyssa was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University, where she is majoring in Writing Seminars and Film & Media Studies.