Julia Frey

JULIA FREY's two gifts, art and writing, are notoriously low-paying, so to handle her incorrigible habit of eating regularly, she got a PhD (Yale, French literature), then a 25-year, full-time "day job" as an academic. When her husband, novelist Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004) developed a fatal wasting illness, she changed to a completely unpaid job, 24/7, as a notoriously ungifted caregiver. On September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers collapsed just outside the windows of their tiny apartment,...See more

JULIA FREY's two gifts, art and writing, are notoriously low-paying, so to handle her incorrigible habit of eating regularly, she got a PhD (Yale, French literature), then a 25-year, full-time "day job" as an academic. When her husband, novelist Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004) developed a fatal wasting illness, she changed to a completely unpaid job, 24/7, as a notoriously ungifted caregiver. On September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers collapsed just outside the windows of their tiny apartment, the couple, neither one in the least heroic, somehow muddled through and at times even came out laughing. Her personal memoir, "Balcony View, Living at Ground Zero After 9/11", published for the 20th anniversary of the attacks, tells how she improvised protecting a gravely ill Ron (and their blind, lunatic cat, Pearl) in the midst of a catastrophe: a story grown more important because the pandemic and repeated climate-change disasters have made so many confront similar problems.There's a reassuring happy ending. Widowed, Frey has remarried, moved to France and become a full-time writer. Her critically acclaimed biography "Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life" won a Pen Literary Award, was chosen a notable book by The New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next book, "Venus Betrayed, the Private World of Édouard Vuillard"(2019) is a biographical study of another French artist. She also writes an episodic humor column on French language: "Amuse-Bouche - Explaining French to Americans."She divides her time between Paris and the French Riviera, using the six-hour train rides to get a lot of writing done. And she still has the bad habit of eating regularly. http: //www.juliafreyauthor.com/ See less