A young girl arrives at the office of Sigmund Freud with symptoms that have baffled the best medical minds in Vienna. During a lengthy psychoanalysis, a disturbing dream surfaces that figures in a cure but whose deeper meaning Freud deliberately withholds. The novel traces the heroine's subsequent journey to America to attend Vassar College, then back to Vienna where she finds herself in an arranged marriage marked by sexual bondage. Her efforts to escape an oppressive existence plunge her into a series of intrigues involving Carl Jung, the artist Gustav Klimt and her former analyst before she discovers how Freud's failure to fully interpret the dream altered the course of her life.
"Tampico, Tampico, on the bay of Mexico Where the men say buenos dias, and the women cook tortillas" There are some other lines in the poem that involve tamales and serapes but I can't pull them up at the moment. What does stick in my mind is that the poem was the first piece of writing for which I ever got paid, my first royalty if you will. Our third grade teacher at P.S. 191 in Brooklyn had asked the class to come up with an original work that might illustrate life in Latin America, the topic currently under study. "Tampico, Tampico" was the result of that assignment. At the time, a savings institution, The East New York Savings Bank, was circulating a weekly newsletter in neighborhood schools that featured items of local interest. Featured in the newsletter was a section devoted to short stories, drawings and poems contributed by students. My teacher urged me to submit my poem...and so I did. Not only did the East NY Savings Bank publish my poem, but they paid me a dollar! One of my great regrets in life is that I didn't keep the dollar. Today, it would be sitting on the wall above my computer, framed in an elegant walnut frame as a reminder of the great fortunes to be made as a writer. But like most impulsive nine-year-olds, I hurried to a nearby candy store once school let out and before you could say, Tampico, Tampico, the money was gone. With the passage of time, I came to realize that I posed no threat to Robert Frost or Emily Dickenson...but the urge to write nevertheless persisted. Over the years during which I taught at two state universities, I published several professional books, including one on abnormal psychology and two on psychotherapy. But what I really longed to do was write fiction. So after years of teaching, I decided to surrender my tenured position -- despite my colleagues' admonition to keep my day job -- and write full time. Emma von N., a novel about a Viennese schoolgirl plagued by a disturbing dream that has shattering implications for her life, is the result of that decision, although there have been some detours along the way, one of which was a non-fiction work on the hidden meaning of fairy tales, The Witch Must Die. But now Emma von N., the book I originally left academics to write is a reality and who knows what will follow next.
