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.
Continue reading “How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’”
