1–What is the title of your latest release? PICASSO’S LOVERS   2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? You know Pablo Picasso.  Now meet his muses.  Picasso’s Lovers is a tangled and vivid portrait of the woman caught in Picasso’s charismatic orbit through the affairs, the scandals, and the art.  Only this time, they hold the brush.   3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? The characters made this decision, not me!  I wanted to tell the story of a young but already successful Pablo Picasso meeting the beautiful socialite Sara Murphy, their initial meetings in Paris in 1922 and 23, and then the summer they and their families spent at Antibes, in the south of France. The narrative is based on true events, and I ran it with from there, imagining all the “what ifs”. To tell this story I had to take a close look at the nature of Sara’s marriage to the very handsome Gerald, and at Picasso’s discontent with his own marriage. Mix passion, love (not always the same thing!) with sun and sand and fabulous food. Voila.  The sun bursts in gold on your eyelids.   4–Would you hang…

The legendary rivalry between Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli is well known in fashion history. What drew you to write about this notorious feud in The Last Collection? It seemed, currently, to be a very good time to be writing about strong, powerful women who do not back down from competition or threats.  I once visited a country that did not have freedom of press and information, and I needed a complicated visa to get there. The clerk at the embassy asked me what I did for a living (I was a journalist at the time) and I told him I was a writer.  He jumped up from his desk, truly alarmed!  He asked me what I wrote about, and I said family studies, human development, nutrition, consumer finance.  He sat back down and said , “Oh. Women’s stuff. Doesn’t matter.”  I got the visa, but I also got a strong lesson about what many people think of women’s issues.  This book says that ‘women’s stuff’ really does matter. Europe in the late 30s, as we know, is on the cusp of a tumultuous time that leads to WWII. What did this political landscape add to your story? How did…