Heidi Diehl

Heidi Diehl's new novel is Lifelines.

From her interview with Jeff Dingler for Saratoga Living:

It’s a very ambitious debut novel. What was the inspiration to write something so outside of your comfort zone?

I was really quite interested in that time period: the ’70s in West Germany. My grandparents were German immigrants to New York, and my mom’s had a lot of connections to Germany. It was a place that was really close to my parents, and I’ve been there a lot. But having this German heritage is, of course, quite troubling when you think of German history and the Holocaust. There had been this culture of denial after the war, this culture of silence, and in the late ’60s and ’70s, it began to swing the other way. People who were born in the postwar generation were really trying to find ways to come to terms with that history. Which, I guess, as a person of that heritage, I was also trying to grapple with so many years later. So I found a lot of inspiration in that time period. It just seemed so psychologically complicated.

The novel got an endorsement from George Saunders. What did that feel like?

It was such a generous take on the book from him. Actually, when George was...[read on]

Visit Heidi Diehl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue