Leslie Bazzett is a writer whose fiction has appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and recipient of the NER Award for Emerging Writers, she now makes her debut with Mia, a stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about reinvention, obsession, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone else.
Set in San Miguel de Allende, Mia follows Sally, an American living in Mexico for a year with her husband and children, after she falls under the spell of Louise, a glamorous and severe older expat. What begins as an intense friendship takes a stranger turn when Louise starts calling Sally “Mia” and introducing her as her daughter. As Sally embraces the possibility of a new identity while hiding the relationship from her husband, the boundaries between performance and reality begin to collapse, turning the novel into a twisted exploration of mothers and daughters, self-invention, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
We asked Bazzett to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Oh, wow, there are so many… If I were to go way back, early childhood, I remember being captivated by the Dr. Seuss book Are You My Mother? Given that I had a very peripatetic childhood, it perhaps makes sense that I would have connected to a story of a lost baby bird wandering through increasingly foreign and frightening landscapes, while mistaking various other species and even inanimate objects for its mother. Fast forward to my debut novel, Mia, which is about a woman whose unconscious desire to find a replacement for the mother who abandoned her becomes the dark driver of the story, in which our heroine eventually pretends to be the daughter of an often-less-than-maternal woman whom she meets while living in a foreign country… No doubt a psychotherapist would find this all quite interesting! But I had never thought of this particular literary antecedent until your question, so thank you for reminding me of the power of stories, and the multiplicity of ways our childhood selves never leave us.
What book helped you through puberty?
I often read things that were not intended for my age group — because I was intrigued by the cover art, or because my father was reading a novel aloud to his girlfriend, or simply because of my rather tantalizing suspicion that books contained answers to questions I didn’t even know how to pose. God help me, I vividly recall reading Anaïs Nin around this time — likely a better response to the alternate question, “What book complicated your already unwholesome puberty?” Undoubtedly, all those non-age-appropriate books still constituted a certain kind of education, and thus could be termed a help. But when I think about the lead-up to puberty, the eleven- or twelve-year-old me, I would have to say Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Much has been said about it being a non-explicit queer and neuro-divergent novel, but what resonated with me was its “portrait of the artist as a young girl,” in which the heroine of the title would ordinarily be perceived as “bad” (and in fact, for a time the novel was banned for this very reason). In as much as every book is simultaneously about its subject matter and about the act of writing, Harriet stands as a moving depiction of why and how writers are compelled to be voyeurs and, in a sense, pillagers, helpless not to regard everything as potential material — impulses roundly condemned within, shall we say, polite society. But, so, the story helped me understand myself, and that this urge to capture the world in language is at once meaningful and joyful and isolating.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
I went through a period of many years, beginning around this age or maybe a little younger, where I felt quite alienated from the women writers I was encountering, whether through school assignments or otherwise. It was deeply unfortunate, almost like a kind of self-abnegation, but I understand it, because it was fueled by my mistrust of the idea that there exists some sort of “sisterhood” among women — and in a sense a mistrust of traditional narratives themselves, which I often observed women I knew use to justify tidy readings of their own “story arcs,” where every step and misstep gets a retroactive clear antecedent, and partnerships, marriage, daughterhood and motherhood are deemed acceptable (or not) accordingly. In no way had my life borne out these notions! I wish, therefore, that I had read Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Natalia Ginzburg, Han Kang, Yoko Ogawa; women who write with ferocious honesty about the complexities of being female, freed from the constraints of “likable” protagonists who behave with moral rectitude. One recent book that I adored, and that leaps out as a book that would have blown my mind in all the best ways as a 16-year-old, is Couplets, the novel-in-verse by Maggie Milner.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I haven’t taught, so I’m not sure how many books you can reasonably include in a syllabus…? At a first pass, and to provide some interesting variety in terms of what that can look like: The short stories of William Trevor; the early, short novels of John Le Carré; The Door by Magda Szabo; Family & Borghesia by Natalia Ginzburg; The Invisible Collection & Buchmendel by Stefan Zweig; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion; The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Fixer (poems) by Edgar Kunz. Plus anything by Claire Keegan and Elena Ferrante. So hard to stop here, but I will!
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Well, I wrote the book over many years, with many extensive revisions, and I looked to different books with specific problems and questions I was trying to solve at various times. But in the main, I suppose The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith, and The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan (specifically the beginning of that novel).
What books are on your nightstand now?
I have a strong hunch that many respondents to this question curate their answers, so in the interest of complete honesty and transparency, I actually walked upstairs to my attic bedroom. Here they are, unfiltered: Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans; Maigret in New York by Georges Simenon; So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan; The Word of the Speechless by Julio Ramón Ribeyro; On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle; Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle; By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño; Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni; Black Observatory (poems) by Christopher Brean Murray; plus an oppressively large stack of old New Yorker magazines that I still haven’t gotten through.