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The idea for “I Am Becoming a Woman”

The free giveaway days of my book are still continuing!
Just start reading and you’ll not be able to put down this true real life story book about searching of love in Russia of the perestroika era!

Now I am posting my answer to the author questionnaire on the Goodreads website.
(By the way, you can see my literary preferencies and my latest book reviews on Goodreads here on my Goodresds profile https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20548739.Rebecca_Popova )

Goodreads question: Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?
Rebecca Popova: Oh, I can really shed additional light on the origins of my last book. )
The idea of ​​writing came to me last May while reading the famous saga of Marcel Proust “À la recherche du temps perdu”. I have to admit I am a devoted fan of this french author.

So, thinking about how Proust builds his story, I was surprised to find that in his text Proust was giving not too much plot development in terms of the amount of “action”. But at the same time a certain impressionable young man with a fine mental organization, chosen as the main character of the novel, perceives some ordinary and unremarkable things that happens to him, in a very sharp manner. Therefore, on the pages of the novel, we come across literally “kilograms” of the author’s reasoning on general themes and an analysis of the elusive feelings of this young man. And all this is held together solely based on the unique recognizable author’s style and on this very analysis of the smallest sensations, plus on not too banal – and sometimes, on the contrary, even on a little paradoxical – reasoning on general topics.
And at that very moment I suddenly thought: but I can also reason a lot, and maybe even no less original than Proust, in my very immodest opinion. And in my reasoning I stand on the position of a person familiar with the much later and more sophisticated fruits of intellectual achievements of human civilization than Marcel Proust could use in his reasoning .. And the events of my youth were certainly much more exciting than these that our respected Marcel had.)
And it was that very moment when I started writing my book “I Am Becoming a Woman”)

…So don’t forget to download and read my book on the free days of August 15-17.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CXYPPW3/

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Is it interesting to read memoirs?

My story “I Become a Woman” is a true story from real life.

But let’s think, what’s different about memoir literature.

As I wrote earlier, the ideological inspirer of my cycle of stories “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh” is Marcel Proust.
In his novel “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower,” Proust touches on the comparison of fictional reality and reality extracted from memory. Proust discusses the memoirs of Saint-Simon and writes about the author’s desire to insert into his text real words and characters, which in the living integrity of the work can then turn out to be a dead weight, its weakness. When Saint-Simon creates the characteristics of his contemporaries, he does it amazingly, but when he quotes the “lovely”, in his opinion, expressions of various smart people, they sometimes seem mediocre or unclear …
So, according to Proust, the author’s desire not to commit falsehood in the describing of real events imposes certain restrictions on any memoir narration.

I can confirm that this is undoubtedly so, and I really experienced limitations when coming up with the text of my story.
Indeed, in the case of some completely fictional story, the author constructs events and heroes, feeling free to fill in his text with any details to create a more impressive fictional world, and in this case the author’s fantasy has no restrictions other than his own literary taste. A fictional hero is usually a collective image, that is, it combines the features of several real or fictional characters.
Whereas, in documentary narration, the main task of the author is not to invent the most convincing and impressive details, but to convey real details as accurately as possible, without sinning against the truth. That is, for the author of memoirs, the events of his own life are so significant that he seems to be afraid to distort them at least in some way.

By the way, sometimes real life events are so intense that they can even overshadow the author’s personality.
This is what the famous Russian philologist Dmitry Likhachev writes about one of the most famous autobiographies in the history of world literature – “Confessions” by Jean Jacques Rousseau: in a fit of desperate frankness and in an effort to diligently convey the true facts of his biography, Rousseau seemed to have overshadowed his true personality, his real mental and spiritual life with an external outline of events, and thus in his autobiography the great thinker was turned into a kind of some fictional character.
Of course, when it comes to such a great thinker and public figure like Rousseau, such a “replacement” of the hero can be disappointing for the reader who expects to see some truly magnificent image in the autobiography of his idol.
But in the case of my own memoirs, curious events of the life can be interesting in themselves. 🙂
So, all of the above does not mean at all that my story is poor in events. And moreover – in terms of personal reflection on the events that have taken place, the heroine’s emotions are really extra genuine.

One of my beta readers – an Englishman – asked me in surprise:
did all this really happen to me in reality?

Another beta reader of mine, an American – who, by the way, is a writer himself – said that he was most interested exactly in stories from real life.

This is why, as rhey say, sometimes life is more convoluted than any fiction.

So… Do not forget to download my novel “I Become a Woman” on free days from 28 to 29 November.

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What can a reader find in the book “I Am Becoming a Woman”

Probably all of us have ever heard the phrase that in the same book, each reader finds something of his own. In fact, everyone reads his own individual book, because something in the text leaves him completely indifferent or even irritates him, while other fragments of the text evoke a strong emotional response or an influx of associations and memories in his soul. That is why the reviews about the same book are often so contradictory – readers simply have different backgrounds – both in life and in reading, different life experiences and different taste preferences … Even two brothers, two inseparable friends, or the husband and his wife who have lived together for a long time may have diametrically opposite tastes in some matters, because the inner world of each person is a kind of his whole universe, somewhat similar to the virtual world of a computer game, and not each of us is a filmmaker to embody his ever-changing phobias and fatazia in such a form that he can show it to other people. (haha, and besides, by the way, some of us are writers who are also capable of embodying phobias and fantasies of their inner world, but in this case they do it not using the camera, like a film director, but with a help of great and mighty art of words).

Of course, several of my acquaintances – my beta readers – have already read the book and told me about their feelings from reading. And I was surprised at so various topics for discussion that we had with them after reading. In fact, the text of my book turned out to be something like a litmus test for the inner world of my friends.

One guy – a writer – read the text from a purely professional point of view, but at the same time he was extremely sensitive to all sexual aspects as a man. Having his own Jack Kerouac stage in life driving around America in a cheap car, he was more impressed by the second part of the Cycle – “Serious Relations”, at the beginning of which some rampant alcoholic revelry is described. (By the way, let me remind you that “I Am Becoming a Woman” is the first part of the whole series “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”, and the next part – “Serious Relations”, which I am planning to release approximately in three months – there are some much more frank details.)
Another writing guy (to myself, I call his literary tastes typically mid-American) treated the text as a classic romance with personages and characters. At the same time, I think he remained rather indifferent to my style and did not notice my irony, while I myself consider the literary style to be my main merit (“A person is a style,” said one extravagant Russian political guy-writer, just after communicating with whom I began writing a lot, which is described in the fourth part of my epic entitled “Belle Epoque or the Age of the Live Journal”).
The third man found the text as to the author’s slightly ironic view of the events of his past life (and, I confess, this his perception is something similar to my own).
People closest to me in spirit paid attention not only to the sexual component, but also to all numerous details that occupied my thoughts and gave an idea of ​​life in the USSR and in Russia at that time. People far away from me in their spirit demanded more eroticism in the text and less descriptions of specific places in Moscow, but at the same time they were doing justice to my style…

To be honest, I still do not have many responses from women, although I am sure that it would be especially interesting for them.

Today, August 17, 23.59 PDT is the last day of the free downloading of the book.
Immerse yourself in the Russia perestroika era life and compare the heroine’s first sexual experience with your own experience!

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I Am Becoming a Woman booktrailer

These very last days before August 14, I was coming up with and editing my booktrailer dedicated to the release of the book.
For the soundtrack, I used a free melody from the YouTube stock – this is a composition called Journeyman by musician Aakash Gandhi, which I really liked.
To edit the clip, I used the Clipchamp program, which allows editing online, but when I am trying to save the file in good quality, it offers to buy a paid Upgrade.

You may put your” like” here on Youtube:

Don’t forget to download and read my book on the free days of August 15-17.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CXYPPW3/

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The woman who stayed unknown

A few days ago, in the very end of one of my favorite films “Deja Vu”, I saw Claire, unable to tear her seemingly hypnotized gaze from Doug’s face, nodding in response to his question if they had met earlier – indeed, these things sometimes happen when the time space is warped. And at this very moment I asked myself: where else – in what kind of invented world – did the woman know so much about the man she met while he was convinced that he was meeting her for the first time in his life?


Now I think that, of course, it would be much more logical for me to remember “The Time Traveler’s Wife” and the very moment when Henry meets Claire (Claire again!) for the first time in his life at the Newberry library, but she has known him for a long time since her childhood and knows that sooner or later the day will come when they will meet …
But at that moment I remembered about the “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig (1922).

What it is like to re-read a book you read in your youth, and to recognize suddenly those passages in the text that once made a special impression on you? … For example, I remember I felt lost in thoughts when reading these lines in my youth:
“I understood that you the one, who loves only everything that is carefree and easy, who seeks only play in love …“
“You love only everything light, weightless, fleeting, you are afraid to interfere in someone’s fate …“

“To you, who never knew me,” – this is how the letter from an unfamiliar woman to the subject of all her thoughts begins. And a little further we read: “Fate doomed me to be unrecognized by you all my life, until my death … Even a fleeting memory of me never bothered you. Nothing reminded you of me, not even the most subtle thread of memory has not been stretched from your life to mine. “

What it is like to look at a heartfelt, screaming message about devoted love a hundred years after it was written, of which the last few decades have been decades of a kind of struggle between traditional values ​​and monogamy with something completely opposite?

I will quote here from Davis Robertson’s recently re-read “The World of Wonders” (1975):
“If you listen to what people are talking about, or see what they read and what they go to theaters and cinema to, you might think that a real man is certainly amorous and the more women he has, the more masculine he is. The ideal man for them is Don Juan. An unattainable ideal for most men, because if you want to devote your life to lasciviousness, you must have leisure and money, let alone the fact that such a life requires inexhaustible energy, unquenchable lust, and the sexual organ must be as strong as the woodpecker’s beak. An unattainable ideal, but nevertheless thousands of men try themselves in this field, and in old age they sort out their miserable victories, like beads of a rosary. But a one-woman man is a very rare occurrence. He needs spiritual resources and psychological artistry – no match for mediocrity, but he also needs luck, because a one-woman man must find a woman of outstanding qualities. “

I have experienced very conflicting emotions, rereading this text again after so many years! At first I thought about the extreme self-deprecation of the heroine, about the need, so to speak, of the timely intervention of a psychologist… But soon I got involved and started accepting the “rules of the game” in this text.
I recalled a similar obsession described in Kuprin’s “Garnet Bracelet” (1910) and the words addressed to the object of worship, putting thus woman on the same level with a kind of shrine: “Hallowed be thy name!“.
And finally, as a person who likes to mix the invented life and the reality, I was damn sorry that, during their nights of love, the heroes did not discuss the books writen by the object of love- “the fiction writer R”, which the heroine, she claimed, knew by heart – of course, this not too serious detail would reduce significantly the high degree of self-denial in the novel.
Probably every man can only dream of such an enthusiastic secret admirer who says in a letter to her beloved man:
“What was my whole life since the very awakening from childhood, if not expectation – expectation of your whim!”

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