Born to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother, novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom spent many childhood summers in Beirut. Her first book, Three Apples Fell From Heaven (2001) deals with the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman government and was named one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The Daydreaming Boy (2004), about a genocide survivor living in 1960s Beirut, won the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction. Her other books include Draining the Sea (2008), The Mirror in the Well (2008), A Brief History of Yes (2013), The Brick House (2017), and The New American (2020). Marcom is the Founder and Creative Director for The New American Story Project, a collaboration of artists presenting oral histories and stories of immigrants and refugees in order to bear witness, raise awareness, and provoke transformative conversation. Her eighth book, Small Pieces, will be published in June 2023. She is a professor Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
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The Mirror in the WellA Novel
And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.
The Mirror in the Well:A Novel -
The Mirror in the WellA Novel
There are many things she can say to her lover in the first weeks of their affair that she cannot say to him later and that she can never communicate to the husband, that can be said when one is known only sexually and without the habits and interceding fears of the conventional self and before the roles are set and the patterns established, when it is only the vibrations of the man and the vibrations of the woman, then everything is seeable in its nature…
The Mirror in the Well:A Novel -
The Mirror in the WellA Novel
Then when the husband arrives, he is chagrined, he is no longer angry, his love for her has burnt down to a small and almost invisible blue pyre and although he loves, he won’t love her any longer and tells her that he felt constrained, and he says it as if the word itself pulled his limbs his mind backwards and tied and burnt him. You don’t love me? she says. He says—What is love. And then she senses that it has not been love which has defeated them and she is not sure what came in to do it, wrest them out of each other, her own urges, perhaps, outside of the moral codes and fear…
The Mirror in the Well:A Novel
“The fierce beauty of her prose both confronts readers with many breathtaking cruelties and carries us past them . . . But the novel is much more than a catalog of horrors, however brilliantly described. It is also about love and tenderness, the pleasures of custom and ritual, the moments of unexpected generosity and courage and, above all, the necessity of remembering—oneself, one’s family, one’s language, one’s history.” —Margot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review [on Three Apples Fell From Heaven]
“A disturbing, powerful work . . . Marcom’s writing is intensely poetic . . . The effect is surreal, imparting the sense of how it is to continue living when all normal things have gone awry.” —The Washington Post Book World [on Three Apples Fell From Heaven]
“Lyrical . . . from the start you feel as though you are in the presence of an authentic voice, in this case a voice that weeps and wails and growls and shouts and chants and moans and sings about the 20th Century’s first—but least-known—ethnic massacre . . . Marcom is so talented . . . [Three Apples Fell From Heaven] will stay with its readers a good long while.” —Chicago Tribune
Selected Works
