About Carol von Arnim
Pray Like Shakespere
Pam Nelson is a successful businesswoman in 1970s Manhattan. She loves everything about New York. She is surrounded by eccentric friends. She goes to concerts and clubs. The one thing missing from her life is love. But love, when it finds her, proves to be her downfall. The man she marries, Nate Bolsaro, is a debonair Brazilian conman. To escape his own past, Nate convinces Pam to sell everything and move to Mexico, where they renovate and open the Playa Mazatlán, a beachfront hotel. There is a period of joy for Pam. But Pam soon learns that the Playa Mazatlán is both a paradise and a prison. And the conman holds the key.
"This is what you will write."
I was walking out of a meeting, and an inner voice said, “This is the title of the book you will write.” A few days later, the story came to me in much the same way. I began writing eight to ten hours a day and couldn’t stop. The story had to be told. Carol von Arnim is a retired tech executive from California, whose first work was a historical novel set in Nazi Germany. She majored in English at the University of Utah.
She is now working on Mother's Day, a collection of short stories written from the perspective of absence—the absence of the mother figure. The absence of a particular thing is the most poignant viewpoint from which to describe it, particularly on the topic of motherhood. It is based on the true story of an AIDS patient in the 1980s whose dying wish was to see his mother.