Michener, Marian

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MICHENER, Marian

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: San Francisco State University, M.A. (creative writing).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Seattle, WA. Agent—c/o Spinsters Ink, 32 East First St., #330, Duluth, MN 55802-2002.

CAREER:

Writer and college administrator.

WRITINGS:

Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story: A Novel, Silverleaf Press (Seattle, WA), 1988, published as Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, Spinsters Ink (Duluth, MN), 1999

SIDELIGHTS:

In her novel Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, originally published as Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story, Marian Michener tells the story of Olivia, a would-be writer whose dreams of success are foiled by her addiction to alcohol. She spends her days and nights obsessing about "Sister Wine," as well as her destructive relationship with her lover, Brooke. As Olivia realizes she must break her addiction, she takes the first steps toward sobriety and ends her relationship with Brooke. Olivia takes a job as caretaker of a remote cottage on the Oregon coast to concentrate and withdraw into her writing. By doing so, she manages to write about her path to addiction and how it has affected her life. Although she doesn't succeed as a writer, the process allows her to understand how her past contributed to both her addictions and new state of consciousness, which aids her in staying away from alcohol and beginning the long climb through life as a sober person. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer praised Michener's "multifaceted and fresh" characters as well as her "down-to-earth details." In Lambda Rising, reviewer Debra Weinstein commented that although the book's structure, a series of flashbacks, is not as strong as it could be, "the strength of this book is in the [elegant] writing."