Ellen Pall is the Author of Must Read Well and this week’s featured Worth Reading book
What is your book about?
Must Read Well is the story of the strange intimacy between two formidable women brought together by chance. It’s about ambition, love, trust, deceit, and the uneasy bond that arises when an elderly, once famous, now forgotten novelist must expose her deepest secrets to a brilliant, troubled young scholar trying to build her career on a study of the writer’s work.
Anne Taussig Weil is the author of a single bestseller. Vision-damaged, Weil is no longer able to read the hundreds of journals in which, for seventy years, she recorded the story of her own life. But before she dies, she longs to revisit her entries about a transformative episode in 1963: her secret, passionate, disastrous love affair with a celebrated pianist. She needs someone to read the journal entries aloud to her, and Liz Miller becomes that person.
Miller, not yet thirty, is a Ph.D. candidate who grew up in a violent, hand-to-mouth household in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. Whip-smart, she got herself into Columbia University; nine years later, she’s almost earned her doctorate there. The one thing standing in her way is the chief subject of her dissertation: Anne Taussig Weil.
Frail and dangerously ill, forced to play hostess to a woman she considers a threat in order to relive her own most intimate past, Weil finds herself plunged into a game of cat and mouse. But who is the cat, and who is the mouse?
What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?
Must Read Well is a swift read, and I hope it draws people in and keeps them wanting to know what will happen next right up to the end. I hope readers close the book with that great feeling of having really lived inside it for a while.
I also hope some thoughts will remain about ambition, especially for women whose goals and values put them in at odds with traditional expectations—and with each other. Too, I’d like to think the story will stir up some thoughts about trust and trustworthiness—trust within a marriage, trust between lovers, but also trust between women—how we can sometimes support each other in deep, unexpected ways.
How can our readers get a copy of your book?
Must Read Well is available for preorder now at www.Amazon.com, at www.BarnesandNoble.com, at Apple Books, and at www.TheBookshop.org, an online site where you can buy it (at a discount) from local booksellers.
What is the best way for readers to connect with you?
Please email me via the contact link at my website, www.EllenPall.com
I’d love to hear from you.
