Bold New Novel Explores Obstacles to Wholeness for Mixed-race People
MIRROR ME by Lisa Willimson Rosenberg is a MUST-READ!
Fam,
You know I’m here to share what I consider top-tier resources, which will always include books!
And I have a special love for books by and about Mixed-race characters because they’re still too rare.
Before we dive into the deliciousness of Lisa Williamson Rosenberg and her second novel, MIRROR ME, here’s a little personal backstory.
In 2005, I moved with my teen son and daughter to the unique and cool township of Montclair, New Jersey. Montclair was very racially diverse back then, and full of writers, creatives, and some of your favorite actors and screen personalities.
In my new job as community editor of the local weekly paper, The Montclair Times, I raised my hand to interview a local psychotherapist speaking at a synagogue about being Black and Jewish. Never in my then 50-something years had I EVER encountered anyone with my mix addressing or speaking about it publicly. This was a huge deal for me!
That speaker was Lisa Williamson Rosenberg. I interviewed her for the article, titled “Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish,” and we became fast #BLEWISH friends. The article was widely circulated among synagogue newsletters and even led to Lisa and I traveling to speak to a Jewish women’s group in the central part of the state.
We also had my hometown of Seattle in common—during her ballet career, Lisa joined Pacific Northwest Ballet. And, as she describes in our conversation below, she shared some of her early novel writing efforts with me. I was very impressed and never doubted that she would find success in this career.
All About Lisa
Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is an author and psychotherapist in private practice specializing in developmental trauma and multiracial identity. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Lisa’s short fiction has appeared in Literary Mama and The Piltdown Review, her essays in Literary Hub, Longreads, Narrative.ly, The Common, Grok Nation, and Mamalode.
Her debut novel, EMBERS ON THE WIND, was released on August 1, 2022 by Little A Books. Lisa’s second novel, MIRROR ME, was released on December 1, 2024, also by Little A. A born-and-raised New Yorker, Lisa now lives in Montclair, New Jersey with her husband and dog. She is the mother of two college kids.
About the Book
A psychiatric patient’s desperate search for answers reveals peculiar memories and unexpected connections in a twisty and mind-bending novel of love, family, betrayal, and secrets.
Eddie Asher arrives at Hudson Valley Psychiatric Hospital panicked that he may have murdered his brother’s fiancée, Lucy, with whom he shared a profound kinship. He can’t imagine doing such a terrible thing, but Eddie hasn’t been himself lately.
Eddie’s anxiety is nothing new to Pär, the one Eddie calls his Other, who protects Eddie from truths he’s too sensitive to face. Or so Pär says. Troubled by Pär’s increasing sway over his life, Eddie seeks out Dr. Richard Montgomery, a specialist in dissociative identities. The psychiatrist is Eddie’s best chance for piecing together the puzzle of what really happened to Lucy and to understanding his inexplicable memories of another man’s life. But Montgomery’s methods trigger a kaleidoscope of memories that Pär can’t contain, bringing Eddie closer to an unimaginable truth about his identity.
Lisa Spills Some of Her Creative Secrets!
Q: You have had successful careers as a professional ballerina and a present-day psychotherapist. Where, when, and how did being a writer and an author enter your life?
LISA: Books were the center of my family’s universe when I was growing up. My father was an art director at the Viking Press from before I was born until I was entering high school, when he resigned due to his failing eyesight. My mother was a teacher and literacy specialist. Our bookcases held volumes several layers deep, every surface had books on it, often a teetering stack.
As soon as I could talk, my mother encouraged me to dictate stories to her. She’d write them down and I’d illustrate them of course. My father brought home every picture book Viking released—including those by his good friend, Don Freeman, who created his book CORDUROY after the stuffed bear I was given at birth. (Yes, I am THAT Lisa.) One of the first book launch parties I remember was in celebration of Freeman’s PENGUINS OF ALL PEOPLE. I was five years old and brought my own little Corduroy with me.
So basically, I wanted to be a ballerina at that age, because that’s what every little girl seemed to want. And I wanted to be a writer, because I thought I already was one. I am very lucky to say that both wishes somehow managed to come true.
Q: What fuels your writing?
LISA: I’d say, first of all: escape. That would be the number one thing that compels me to write. Like all writers—at least the majority—I have a mind that spins 24/7 with “what-if’s” big and small. When real-world circumstances feel impossible, I am grateful for the ability to access fictional worlds that I can control. MIRROR ME, which once had a different title and was a very different story, is a great example. I pulled up this old document—something I’d been tinkering with on and off for more than a decade—while my daughter was undergoing treatment for cancer. The uncertainty of her condition at that time would have been unbearable if not for the ability to sink into the story now and then. While writing, I’d recharge and regroup so I could remain strong for my family.
The other thing that fuels my writing is also what drew me to my day-job as a psychotherapist: my fascination with people—their stories, relationships, and quests. What stands between an individual and whatever it is they crave: peace, love, redemption, revenge, healing, stability? That question feeds every story for me. The possibilities are endless.
Q: MIRROR ME has a fascinating premise and storyline. How did you meet Eddie / Pär and what compelled you to tell THIS exciting story?
LISA: This book, as I suggested earlier, has been evolving for more than a decade. The seeds of it were actually extracted from my very first adult novel, called Birchwood Doll. TaRessa, I don’t know if you remember that manuscript, but I was working on it when we met, and you actually advised me on a draft of it. Birchwood Doll was a fairly autobiographical story about a biracial ballerina who would evolve into the character of Lucy. I wrote Birchwood Doll when I was just figuring out craft—in many fitful, piecemeal lessons. It was the book I revised, reworked, tossed out, dusted off, hired a book coach a book for, submitted, got rejected, and loved with all my soul. Though Birchwood Doll was a finalist for the Nilson Unpublished Novel prize, it never saw the light of publication—never even landed me an agent. It was sprawling and bulky, but full of good characters, passages, and descriptions of ballet culture that I’ve used elsewhere, including in pieces I’ve published.
MIRROR ME began as a sequel to Birchwood Doll, originally called Acid Shabbat, in which Eddie trips on acid, then shows up at a Shabbat dinner hosted by his sister-in-law (Amy, who would become Lucy), the troubled ballerina from Birchwood Doll, and things get wild.
This book addresses race and families and adoption and secrets, but there isn’t a political message anywhere, only a story that spun itself as I was trying to harness it.
I hope it entertains and surprises and makes you say: Wow! What is she going to write next?
I became obsessed with Eddie’s character, his anxiety and sense of feeling other in the world, his relationships with his family and his neuroses. I knew I needed him to be Black and Jewish like I am, a bit of an outsider in each culture. He came to me male, as the brother-in-law of Lucy, and I left him that way. I like him as a young man buffeted by life. The story itself and the character of Pär, who is essentially Eddie’s personal Greek Chorus, came gradually. I’ve been tinkering with this novel—mostly while on breaks from other projects—since 2009.
The very first novel I ever wrote was a weird AIDS era update of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where there was an actual Greek Chorus that came out before every chapter and spoke in verse. I’ve always as a reader been obsessed with POV. Who is talking, what do they know, and how do they know it? Pär took shape from those questions.
Q: How did writing this book challenge and stretch you as an author? How did the process fulfill you?
LISA: I think it was really important that I put this book aside, often for years at a time while I learned to actually write a novel. Once I had written several more novels, including the Young Adult ballet book that got me my agent (as yet unpublished) and my debut, EMBERS ON THE WIND, I was able to turn back to this project. By then I was equipped to lean into Eddie’s inner turmoil and flesh out the secrets surrounding his birth.
One thread that weaves through the book this what-if question that’s central to adoption: what if she had raised me? Who and how would I be? The answer lives in Eddie through Par and also another character whose identity, if I share it, would be a spoiler, so I won’t. Adoption is also something I write about quite a lot. I spent several years as an adoption caseworker at the Spence Chapin agency. Part of my job was organizing meetings between birth parents and adoptive families, as well as placing infants in the arms of their adoptive parents. It’s a role that I’ll never forget for a variety of reasons.
Q: What role does identity play in your life and in MIRROR ME?
MIRROR ME is all about identity and belonging, how the absence of the latter compromises the solidity of the former. Of course, there’s also the question of whether Pär is an alternate identity of Eddie’s—or whether that’s a red herring. No spoilers here, but Pär does have access to Eddie’s body, takes over when he is critical of how Eddie is using it. Pär also sees an alternative to Eddie’s life in the secrets Pär knows about their birth mother’s story.
But since MIRROR ME centers biracial-ness, something you and I share, I’ll focus on how that plays into the narrative. Group identities—race, religion, ethnicity, orientation—provide us with a sense of belonging, right? I am because I belong to this group. I am part of this particular “us.” For biracial people like you and me—like my protagonist Eddie, and other characters in the book, including Anders and Lucy—who belong to two or more ethnic “us’s,” there are often obstacles to wholeness. For some, there’s a disconnect from one or both groups, or an embrace of one over the other, a response to being claimed or rejected from either group. Eddie is loved by his Jewish family, immersed in their culture, but kept distant from his Blackness, which is denied. He later tries to make sense of it in various stumbles, latching onto Black friends in college, and later to Robert’s fiancée, Lucy, to piece together what it means to be himself.
The tale of the “tragic mulatto” is such a cliché, but Eddie’s yearning to belong—to others, but also to himself—came from my own. It’s not necessarily a tragic wish, but it can be painful, and is certainly rich for exploration in fiction. I’ve been challenged about my mixed-race identity all my life, asked to defend who I was, been misunderstood when I tried to explain. I’ve taken a circuitous route to self-acceptance and integration—which I have addressed in many personal essays. This journey provides my storytelling with some of its most potent ingredients. I play with the concentration, the order, and the outcome of course, but the theme of duality is always there.
Q: Novels featuring Mixed-race individuals are still relatively new and rare. What are your thoughts about this growing representation?
LISA: I love it. I think there’s room for every variation on every identity out there. The more we center the experiences of people outside the Black/white binary the better. Nothing cancels anything else out, it just normalizes. People who have never seen themselves in fiction can say, ok now that’s familiar. People who have expectations of what a book involving race should be, can be surprised and challenged.
Q: What are the Top 5 Novels that have impacted your life?
LISA: The Waves, Virginia Woolf. Aspects of personality, role, and identity play out over a lifetime. The Waves influenced me in terms of Woolf’s portrayal of each individual’s wildly diverging experience of the same stimuli. It’s one of the things that made me want to be a therapist, but also what made me so drawn to character in my writing. The syntax of her words is absolutely choreographic and to me, despite being obviously dated, captivating as music.
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison. The most perfect literary immersion into the experience of being Black in the line of the white gaze, how one child resists and defies its demands, and the other, whose psyche has been shattered by sexual trauma, succumbs and internalizes it. The most magnificent writing about race, colorism, class, and childhood.
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison. The most phenomenal, evocative language, the intense three dimensionality of character. Such a brutal book. As always, Toni Morrison spares her characters nothing, pulling them through misfortune, shame, humiliation, what’s gripping and fascinating is how each responds to the trials they face. Her work always fortifies my literary courage.
White Teeth, Zadie Smith. In the author’s first novel, we see how multiracial relationships between friends and family can evolve through ages and stages and experience, with race and class as the scaffolding. I love big sprawling stories where we see on the page where the characters came from, what they’ve learned and how they turn out for better or for worse.
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara. This is a tremendous, wonderful, excruciating book to read. It has all my favorite things: incredible language, complex relationships, deeply integrated back stories that make the characters fully realized and human. Sprawling in scope. I am in awe of how the author made it possible to enjoy reading about the impact of trauma and the courage it takes to love and be loved.
Honorable mentions are Zora Neal Hurston for the sensitivity, truth and richness of her work, Phillip Roth, to whose writing I was addicted for years, his unique juxtaposition of 20th Century Americanness and Jewishness, Elizabeth Strout, her focus on the small interior moments between mind and world. Oscar Wilde for the wit. James Baldwin for the beauty and pain wrapped up in rage. And non-fiction: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, the way she explains the impact of our deeply ingrained assumptions about ourselves and others.
Q: What do you want readers to take away from MIRROR ME?
LISA: That’s always the question we writers get tongue-tied over, right? I’m always like, I don’t know: I wrote a book! I hope you like it. No seriously, I hope you’re pulled into the plot and the journey of both Eddie and Pär, the antihero and unreliable but hopefully sympathetic narrator. Hope it resonates for you, that the characters stay with you, that the story keeps you turning pages.
And of course, I think there’s always this hope when an author puts some of their own past or current yearnings into the story: I hope people reach for more books that might have a wildly diverging takes on being brown in the world. This book addresses race and families and adoption and secrets, but there isn’t a political message anywhere, only a story that spun itself as I was trying to harness it. I hope it entertains and surprises and makes you say: wow! What is she going to write next?
Stay in Touch with Lisa:
Website: Lisa Williamson Rosenberg (lisawrosenberg.com)
Instagram: Lisa Williamson Rosenberg (@lwrose.author) • Instagram photos and videos
Facebook: Facebook
Bluesky: (1) Lisa W Rosenberg (@lwroseauthor.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Substack: (62) Saturdays, Taking Stock | Lisa Williamson Rosenberg | Substack
Lisa’s Writer’s Digest article 5 Tips for Exploring Mental Health in Your Fiction - Writer's Digest
First Podcast about MIRROR ME: Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, "Mirror Me" (Little a, 2024) - New Books Network
Black Fiction Addiction Interview Author Lisa Williamson Rosenberg Talks ‘Mirror Me’ - Black Fiction Addiction