Read it now.

Today, award-winning French journalist, filmmaker, photographer, and sound artist Carole Cassier and I recorded the last words of Lucy, go see. Sound engineering lies ahead and then it will be ready for those who would like to listen to me tell the story. I like to imagine traveling with readers, hanging out on the beach with you, sitting in your homes near the fire, or in the kitchen as you cook, or walking with you, perhaps. I think audiobooks are even more intimate than physical books when the author narrates. A second printing has resulted from the reading as I found typos here and there and corrected them. It was difficult and delightful to sit next to Carole each day these last couple of months, reading into the microphone and telling her the story. We paused at times to take breaths, laugh, cry, scream, sing, make jokes in French. I wonder how many times I said, “That was the most difficult part for me to read.” One of many delights was hearing Carole say, “Your story inspires me. I never thought of sculpting a life before.”

We met at DELUXE IOWA soon after I arrived in Iowa City. She was a table away editing a film on her laptop while I was preparing the first draft of Lucy, come home. for printing. Intrigued by her and listening to her speak French to Cecilia, Deluxe Counterperson Extraordinaire, I struck up conversation one day and learned Carole had come to Iowa City with her wife, writer Anna Polonyi, who days ago deposed her MFA thesis in the library archives. There is much to celebrate these days. Tonight we will celebrate the opening of Carole’s documentary, “THE QUIET REBEL”, which recently garnered The Best European Documentary of 2019.

Many thanks to PATV Sound Studios of Iowa City and deep thanks and congratulations to Carole Cassier!

From approximately 2,000 books, 72 were nominated as finalists, and 6 were named winners.

When I moved to Chicago in 2017, after decades away, I hung out in the 3rd Coast Café, as I used to, and as Lucy Pilgrim does in the novel. I moved into an apartment in the building, did a reading of the novel in the café, and wrote a great deal of the second novel, Lucy, come home., there. One Sunday afternoon, a beautiful lively art student, Carina Clark Reimers, flashed in and sat down next to me on her break from working as a hostess at a nearby restaurant. “So, I remind you of you twenty years ago?” she asked after we chatted a while. I thought, sure, let’s say twenty. She reminded me most of all of Lucy. We enjoyed each other’s company during our time in Chicago (she graduated from The Art Institute and is back in her hometown of Los Angeles). One winter evening when she stopped in the Coast, and saw me playing with drawings and cover ideas, she asked if she could help. A few weeks and idea exchanges later, we created this wonderful cover.

Inspired by Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Clothing of Books and French book covers, it was a delight to bring letters, drawing, writing, and design together. Here’s to 3rd Coast Café, Lucy, Carina, me, and Ingram Spark Printers–most immediately–there are so many people I am grateful for who were involved in the creation of this novel. Thank you to Eric Hoffer and the work others carry on for him to celebrate independent authors and publishers. And thank you to you, Readers, so very much.

Carina and I at Sparrow on Elm Street, Chicago, late summer 2017

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Writing while listening to Erla Karlsdottir and her community choir rehearsing in Reykjavik.

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A new season is upon us. During spring, my favorite season, traveling and writing made me feel so happy and once again so deeply at home in the world. Iceland, France, and Spain. Writing everywhere.

I finished the first draft of the second novel in May. I enjoyed reading at The Third Coast Café, and being interviewed by Isabelle David at the Alliance Française in Chicago. Then, with summer, another reading at Carnegie Stout Public Library in Dubuque. Soon after came the idea and opportunity to move again. This time to Iowa City for an academic year. Now fall is gifting me with an international community of writers.

Just want to say hello. Thank you for reading.

The candle I lit for Mom at St. Joes in Key West before the first reading at River Lights was still burning when I returned from Europe.

A lot more has been going on. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by both how much there is to tell, read, do, know, and how much time any of us has. As the end of my life is closer, I am really trying to slow down. My appetite, however, is another story. What a balancing act. Dancing helps. So does yoga. Tenderness and laughter, utmost.

with IWP writers: Ausra Kaziliunaite of Lithuania , Kateryna Babkina of Ukraine, Rumena Buzarovska of Macedonia, Jacqueline Goldberg of Venezuela, Alisa Ganieva of Russia. Read them all; they are brilliant and fascinating.

p.s. – follow me on Instagram (mariannemaili) or Facebook (Marianne Maili)  for more photos and films.

If you wish to buy or offer a book that’s thought-provoking and absolutely ‘unputdownable’, Lucy, go see. is what you’re looking for. When we think of international models we can’t help bringing to mind the usual clichés. However, in Lucy, go see., we are confronted with a funny, philosophical, curious, beautiful woman who explodes most of those preconceived ideas. As we read, Lucy develops into a woman who resists dehumanizing, and being dehumanized  with every bone in her body, in a business world where she is viewed as a commodity, and where back at home in Iowa she is perceived if not exactly as the black sheep, definitely as a multicolored, un-herdable one. People persist in trying to categorize Lucy’s body and mind, and lucky for her that somewhere deep down she manages, against the odds, to retain the knowledge that both are sound. However, when she listens to people around her, they question both, and ‘helpful’ suggestions of lithium and starvation are thrown in her direction. The very essence of Lucy seems to be more at home in nature, than under layers of make-up and crimped hair, but although her Iowa countryside feeds her, she also needs to see a bigger, wider world, and modeling is her ticket out. The reader imbibes her word-painted auto-portrait and is as confused as she when hairdressers, make-up artists and stylists don’t seem to understand the canvas and insist on transmogrifying her beauty into a cheaper, brassier version. Through Lucy’s visits to international modeling agencies, and meetings with top executives and bookers, we get a grasp of how models have to start out on their career with a strong self-image, and fight tooth and nail to maintain it, and understand how they could be easily pushed on a downward spiral of eating disorders and low self-esteem if they don’t have a good spring to their internal resistance. Lucy’s metaphysical questions are not only confined to the city and her jet set career, she also has to deal with advances from her paternal grandfather in an extremely patriarchal mid-western family back in Iowa. She tackles the problem with honesty and integrity and fast fledging courage, ruffling others’ feathers on the way. With her new unfaithful wife and divorcée status, she also has to justify her own right to speak out against being harmed. The treatment of the complex, taboo situation is thorough as Lucy fights to protect herself mentally and physically, and tries to rescue her own pure love for her grandfather from the complex backdrop of a widower’s loneliness and feistiness that took a very wrong turn. Romantic love is not missing from the book and the reader is as fixated and as frustrated as Lucy by the handsome and enigmatic Julien who like Lucy is very different from any stereotypical model. While making love with Julien Lucy has beautiful visions and shortly after they become lovers, Lucy like Saint Teresa, experiences ‘ecstasy’, (as depicted by the artist Bernini in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and not in tablet form!). By the end of the book we feel slightly sorry for the male model agency executives, her family and her ex-husband’s belief that they could categorize Lucy and clip her wings. This strong, shamanic, inspiring woman was way out of their orbit. Lucy, go see. is one of the most enjoyable and inspirational books, for anyone, but particularly for women, who may want to also find the courage to go see for themselves… I can’t wait to see what’s in store for Lucy and hopefully Marianne Maili the author will publish a sequel quickly. We sense that the book may be more than somewhat autobiographical and would also like to discover more about Marianne herself…

–Patricia Killeen

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I am really looking forward to being at the Alliance Française in Chicago in live conversation with friend and ally Isabelle David, a wonderful poet, philosopher, and literature expert–a real Renaissance woman. She honored me when asking if she could be the first to interview me about the novel. I am thrilled and I guarantee you it will be a fun and interesting hour, incisive and thought-provoking as we use the novel to talk about the themes within it–and we laugh often together. The interview will be in English, and I will read Isabelle’s requests from the novel, and then she will open the floor to questions and answers in English and French, which we will interpret in both languages. Please come. Refreshments will be served. I am very grateful to Isabelle and the Alliance for this invitation and for the writing spaces they have provided me, their friendship, and all of the interesting cultural events they offer. I would also like to extend special thanks to Renée Roger-Saito, Director of the Resource Center/ Mediathèque, and to Tiana Pigford, Communication and Library Intern.  Please come join us on Tuesday,  June 12th, at 6:30 p.m.

https://www.af-chicago.org/event/1682

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I am thinking of what it means to be divine, holy, sacred. When I stepped into St. Joe’s Key West last week to be quiet for a while before the first reading of my first novel I was struck by many things. The portrait of Mary in the vestibule first caught my eye-I had never seen it before nor such a direct image of her. I thought of the praise I spoke for my mother at her funeral.

I wanted to light three candles, one for each of my grandmothers and one for my mother, to thank them and to ask them to be with me at the bookstore for the reading, but there were only two candle holders available so I lit one candle with the names of my grandmas on my lips and the other talking to Mom alone. I stepped back and noticed that Mom’s was shining more brightly than all the rest, which it did for the entire time I sat in the front pew of the empty church, and then while I noticed the library of the sanctuary for the first time. When I would show my sister the photos of it the next morning, she would point to the candlesticks on the altar and say, “Those are from Grandma. They were put there for her funeral and have been there ever since.”

On my way out, I noticed the 8th Station of the Cross in a way I never had before. I have memories of spending Good Friday afternoons in the church, praying at each station. I thought of those women who supported Jesus and mostly I kept looking at those two words together: Holy Women. I thought of all the women in my life and how much they have supported me and how rarely I have seen those two words together: Holy and Women. I went to the cemetery and stood over the ground where my beloved mother’s body lays in rest and noticed the shadow of mine over hers. I remembered those precious moments putting the last touches on the novel with Mom at my side, often entering them with one hand as I held hers with the other.

My niece gave me a manicure and told me that I moaned in pleasure at the same points in the hand massage that my mom had. My niece then gently washed and styled my hair. Her daughters watched me get ready for the big night. I remembered my niece, my sister, and I all very close to my mother’s body as we did her hair, at the funeral home before the wake.

When I walked into the bookstore on Main Street of my hometown, the woman who owns it, and the women who work there, and some very dear women friends who arrived before I did opened their arms to me then led me to a table they had set with wine and food for the guests. My sisters were there, and many members of my mom’s family. Women and men. There were women and men I had gone to grade school with, too, and high school, who had known me all my life, others who introduced themselves, and others who had become my friends in the five years I re-rooted there upon return from Europe.

I talked about this story about women, about identity, about abuse, about relationship, about a search for home. I talked, too, about the mother’s voice. My mother’s voice. Women’s voices. My voice. In conversation with women and men.

Women and men. Women and men. Women and men. Amen.

Here are some clips that my sister shot during the reading:

Watch more video clips of the reading here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY3FEAga6xRNaoazK7QVFJQ

When I stopped by the bookstore today, boxes filled with this beautiful novel were being opened, registered, and by now are on the shelves. Lucy is coming out as Mom is leaving.

Get your copy at River Lights tomorrow morning. Doors open at 10 at 1098 Main Street, Dubuque, Iowa.

Lucy’s coming-out party will also be there soon. But, first, come one, come all, and read all about her.