NL: Can you share a bio with us?
MM: I’m an author and professor of English and Journalism at Lehman College/CUNY and CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
NL: What are you currently reading? Do you like it?
MM: Sojourner Truth’s America by Margaret Washington. What a brilliant, funny, formidable, savvy, superhuman powerhouse she was. The book positions her in the political context of her day, and along with all historic reasons she’s iconic, it’s fascinating to read about her early days in the Hudson Valley, where Dutch was her native language.
NL: If you could have any author speak at Nyack Library, who would it be and why?
MM: It already happened: Toni Morrison! But I’d also love to hear Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History this year.
NL: Which character in a book do you most identify with?
MM: Not that I have anything in common with her, but I love and am endlessly fascinated by Hester Prynne.
NL: What books are on your night stand?
MM: Not Now, Not Ever: Ten Years on From the Misogyny Speech by Julia Gillard, The Taking of Jemima Boone by Matthew Pearl, and Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori by Geoffrey Sanborn.
NL: Are there any books that you feel are overrated?
MM: I never understood the appeal of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
NL: Do you have a literary “guilty pleasure”?
MM: Not really. I had to read a lot of memoirs by former Miss Americas in researching my last book, a cultural history of the pageant, and most are pretty low content, but I can’t resist mining new ones for narrative nuggets even though the book came out three years ago.
NL: Would you ever organize your books by color? Yea or Nay?
MM: Never!
NL: What do you plan to read next?
MM: Susanna Moore, The Lost Wife.
NL: What’s the first book that you remember reading?
The Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak. I still have it. It was so brilliantly designed as a set of little books for small hands, and each one contains a whole world.
NL: What’s your least favorite book?
MM: It’s a tossup between Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Dying Animal by Philip Roth. But Roth probably wins because his book is not only myopically self-indulgent but also just astoundingly sexist.