What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Good friends and family living nearby.
2) What is your greatest fear?
My greatest fear has been realized: growing old. Death doesn’t scare me, but what one must endure getting there, does.
3) What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I am a people-pleaser and therefore tend to allow myself to be bullied.
4) What is the trait you most deplore in others?
I deplore the bully.
5) Which living person do you most admire?
Malala Yousafzai: the courageous young Pakistani woman who fought the Taliban for her right to an education.
6) What is your greatest extravagance?
Expensive make-up, perfume, and now wigs.
7) What is your current state of mind?
Good question. Chemotherapy kind of rearranged my brain a bit.
8) What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
If it is truly a virtue, it is not overrated.
9) On what occasions, do you lie?
I lie:
a) When I am afraid
b) To save another’s feelings
c) When all else fails
10) What do you most dislike about your appearance?
As a breast cancer survivor, being bald, losing all of my teeth, and of course the state of my chest.
11) Which living person do you most despise?
I’d rather not say. He knows who he is. Update: I recently learned that this person died five years ago.
12) What is the quality you most admire in a man?
Open-mindedness.
13) What is the quality you most admire in a woman?
Open-mindedness.
14) Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I swear too much. It’s boring.
15) What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Someone who is absolutely amazeballs.
16) When and where were you happiest?
Two times and places: 1959-1967 in Arlington Heights, IL
2011 – 2016 Ellington, CT
17) Which talent would you most like to have?
I wish I could sing.
18) If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
The fine art of subtlety eludes me. I wear my heart on my sleeve like Liberace wore sequins.
Also, I tend to be too cynical.
19) What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Graduating from college and becoming a skilled enough writer and editor to help other writers get published. The latter would not be possible if not for the former. Oh, yeah. I wrote and published four books!
And also beating breast cancer.
20) If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
I don’t want to come back. If I must, then I’d like to be either a rock or an island. According to Simon & Garfunkel, rocks feel no pain and islands never cry.
21) Where would you most like to live?
I want to go home but it’s not there anymore.
22) What is your most treasured possession?
A costume jewelry pin.
23) What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Loneliness: that moment one realizes that s/he is truly alone; there is no one and nothing.
24) What is your favorite occupation?
Writing, because it is the one ‘place’ where I am my true self, and true to myself
25) What is your most marked characteristic?
My sense of humor
26) What do you most value in your friends?
The fact that they are my friends.
27) Who are your favorite writers?
Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flannery O’Connor, Charles Bukowski
29) Who is your hero of fiction?
Scout Finch, of To Kill a Mockingbird and Holden Caulfield, of Catcher in the Rye
30) Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Probably a combination of Franz Kafka & Boo Radley
31) Who are your heroes in life?
I finally figured out that you have to be your own hero.
Ergo, the Ogre 