100 Books Like The Joyce Girl

I’m an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. My work has been widely staged in London, across the UK, and internationally. I’ve had the honor of receiving the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary Award, and I was also nominated for Political Play of the Year. Before I began writing, I worked as an anthropologist. Happy Death Club is my first nonfiction book.

Like many readers, I am fascinated by strong creative women in the past and how their lives can inspire women today. As an academic, before my Creative Writing Diploma and transformation to a creative writer, I taught historical novels of many kinds. I now enjoy devising fascinating women whose lives have significant importance for today’s issues. To talk about my favourite historical figure Virginia Woolf, I have had invitations from galleries and universities around the world, including several in the US and Europe, as well as Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, and Norway. France Culture and Arte TV, and Turkey TRT Television also featured my writing. 

Living in Istanbul, I fell in love with glimpses of Ottoman life still visible there, not only the mosques and palaces but neighborhoods of old wooden houses, like the one where I lived on the upper slopes of the Bosphorus, the small villas and hidden gardens, and quaint customs that have disappeared in modern society. Beginning in my twenties, I spent many years as a social anthropologist in Turkey studying contemporary Turkish society, but I also read about the Ottomans, whose diversity, rich customs, and colorful lifestyles were tragically erased by nationalism and war. The books on my list will let you experience it all.

Jane Austen now dominates my teaching and research. This was not always so. I was trained in the writers that came before Austen and was happily teaching classes on them when someone at my university asked me to teach a class on Jane Austen. At first, I refused to switch. I countered, “She does not need yet another class.”  But I agreed, and soon, I was hooked on her humor and her deft responses to those earlier writers. While the new graphic novel is my third book about Jane, I have not exhausted the things to research! The more I know, the more I admire her writings and her life.

For as long as I can remember, it has been of the utmost importance to find meaning in life, both for myself and for everyone else sharing this planet. I have spent much of my time over the course of the past few years pushing for a continued level of discourse in the field of philosophy. I have studied at and attended various educational institutions including Eastern Florida State College, The Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and The University of Cambridge – the studies at such range between philosophy, psychology, behavior analysis, and engineering. I hope that my work will be of some assistance in pushing humanity towards positive progress.

I have more than 20 years of experience in the field of leadership development and assessment. I am a trained theologian and English/German linguist, and I hold a passion for the more fundamental questions concerning the human condition. In my business consulting practice, I invite clients to become better versions of themselves and to transform their organizations as well as societies by consciously adhering to doing the right thing. 

I completed a Masters in Theology where I studied early Church theology (Patristics) and Jungian analysis. Next, I wanted to pursue a PhD in Patristics to discover how and why the Catholic Church had banished true spirituality for stifling dogma and randy sexual abuse, but I was the mother of four children and had to go to work. I became an acquisitions editor for a Catholic publishing house, which enabled me to continue my research on the building deviation from real spirit in Catholicism. I wrote the Revelations Trilogy instead of doing a thesis in graduate school. This trilogy is very hot and controversial because nobody could control me.

I love people who are totally lost because they are on the brink of their greatest discovery–their true nature. Even as a little boy I remember seeing that everyone has a purpose in life, but that is hidden to them. I have always felt that every step of the way, life seems to be a little off-track. But through authentic stories, I came to an understanding that right now, everyone is doing great things with their lives, even if they can’t see it.

By chance, just over 50 years ago, I became an art therapist in a state hospital on the Northshore of Boston where I have always lived. With support from Rudolf Arnheim at Harvard University and others, I committed myself to furthering personal and community well-being through art. In my mid-twenties I established a graduate program at Lesley University which spawned an international community of expressive arts therapy. I have worked worldwide in advancing art healing and art-based research. Now University Professor Emeritus, and for the first time without a full-time position, I am trying to embrace the unpredictable ways of creation, and as I wrote, Trust the Process.

From the time I could hold a crayon, I was drawing. I often don’t know how I truly feel about something until I make art about it. Led by imagination and curiosity, I'm a seasoned traveler in liminal spaces and love guiding people between the mystical and the mundane. With 20-plus years of experience as an Artist and Creative Director, I've discovered that solutions to any problem can be found through triumphs in imagination and a willingness to view the situation from a different perspective. By peeking into my own shadow, darkness, and hidden places, I've gained a profound reverence for the human soul and deeper compassion for what it is to be alive.