Susan Coll is the author of the novels The Stager, Beach Week, Acceptance, Rockville Pike, and karlmarx.com.Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR.org, and a variety of other publications including The Asian Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune. Acceptance was made into a television movie starring the hilarious Joan Cusack.
From Coll's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Why did you choose a home stager as one of your main characters in The Stager?Visit Susan Coll's website.
A: I’ve long been obsessed with trying to capture the way we live in contemporary suburbia, and the idea of home staging seemed especially rich with metaphor. The Stager’s goal is to create illusions about the way we live---or more accurately perhaps, the way we want to envision ourselves living.
I also love the symbolism of neat exteriors masking messy interior lives. Essentially a stranger comes into the home to strip it of personality, to symbolically declare that the house is no longer the emotional property of the homeowner.
Add to this already volatile emotional situation the fact that the Stager is presumably a complete stranger who has access to the very private realm that is one’s home.
When I had my own home staged at the behest of a Realtor, my admittedly dark imagination began to churn: what if the Stager was not a stranger? What if she had her own agenda? What if she was a person with no boundaries? What if she was...[read on]
Coffee with a Canine: Susan Coll & Zoe.
The Page 69 Test: The Stager.
--Marshal Zeringue