Lucky in Love: Traditions, Customs, and Rituals to Personalize Your Weddingis a cross-cultural collection of rituals meant to bring luck to couples getting married. My next book brings me back to nonfiction and to my folkloric roots. I couldn’t stay away from pomegranates for long, though. (Some people have a spirit animal I have a spirit fruit.) My next novel, The Ladies of Managua, is lacking in pomegranates if it had a symbol, it would be the fuchsia Nicaraguan dragonfruit known as the pitaya, because it follows three generations of Nicaraguan women, each as bright and spiky as that fruit, and each with her own secret, as they’re forced to confront their complicated, passionate, relationships to each other, and to their homeland. It was only after having finished both manuscripts that I realized the pomegranate–a folkloric symbol of abundance–plays a significant role in each book, which is why I’ve adopted it as a personal symbol.
Another book that explores the theme of being torn between two cultures, but this time from a fictional point of view, my first novel Other Waters, is about an Indian-American psychiatrist who thinks that her family has been cursed. My travel memoir, North of Ithaka, describes my experience living in Lia, the small Greek village where my father was born, overseeing the rebuilding of my grandparents’ home. In between staff positions at Allure, Elle, InStyle, People and Martha Stewart Weddings magazines, I earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University and wrote a few books. (You can imagine how un-thrilled my parents were with my choice of major!) Four days after graduation, I moved to New York to work in magazine journalism. My fascination with cultural rituals, beliefs, and intermixing inspired me to study Folklore and Mythology when I went off to college at Harvard University.
The daughter of a Greek father and a Minnesotan mother, I grew up in Athens, Greece, and the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts-and became obsessed with cultural rituals and traditions along the way.
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