SPIEGELMAN, Annie

PERSONAL:

Married; husband's name, Bill; children: Jack.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Northern California. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Seal Press, 300 Queen Anne Ave. N., #375, Seattle, WA 98109.

CAREER:

Film director and author. Assistant director for television series Midnight Caller, 1988, for television movies, including Babies, 1990, Long Road Home, 1991, Shadow of a Doubt, 1991, They, 1993, and My Very Best Friend, 1996; and for films, including True Believer, 1989, My Blue Heaven, 1990, The Doors, 1991, Raising Cain, 1992, When a Man Loves a Woman, 1994, Nine Months, 1995, Bee Season, 2003, and Twisted, 2003.

MEMBER:

Director's Guild of America.

WRITINGS:

Annie's Garden Journal: Reflections on Roses, Weeds, Men, and Life, Carol Publishing (Secaucus, NJ), 1996.

Dear Jack—I'll Be with You When the Sky Is Full of Colors, Wildcat Canyon Press (Berkeley, CA), 2001, published as Growing Seasons: Half-baked Garden Tips, Cheap Advice on Marriage, and Questionable Theories on Motherhood, Seal Press (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Annie Spiegelman is an assistant film and television director whose writings chronicle the many changes in her life as she moves from New York City to northern California, gets married, has a child, and deals with her mother's illness. Connecting her thoughts about life and her first forays into starting a garden by using gardening as a metaphor, her first book, Annie's Garden Journal: Reflections on Roses, Weeds, Men, and Life, relates her frustrations with planting and maintaining her garden as she deals with her emotions of an impending marriage to Bill and her relationship with her divorced parents. All of this is done, as several critics have noted, with a sense of humor aided by the colorful characters in her life, such as the sisters who were largely responsible for raising her. The author, according to a Publishers Weekly contributor, "writes knowingly of the travails of responsible adulthood in a way that is appealing to women." "Annie's sassy, cynical veneer," added Booklist reviewer Alice Joyce, "scarcely conceals a fervent enthusiasm for life's most essential elements."

Similar in some ways to Annie's Garden Journal, Spiegelman's Growing Seasons: Half-baked Garden Tips, Cheap Advice on Marriage, and Questionable Theories on Motherhood is written as a series of diary entries to her toddler son, Jack. Here, Spiegelman struggles to balance motherhood, caring for her sick mother, and her ambition to become a master gardener. Because the author directs her book to her son, however, Library Journal critics Rachel Collins and Mirela Roncevic felt that "it's hard for the reader to feel any connection with the text." On the other hand, Alice Joyce, writing again in Booklist, asserted that "readers will find the refreshingly zany writing to be compelling."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 1996, Alice Joyce, review of Annie's Garden Journal: Reflections on Roses, Weeds, and Life, p. 317; June 1, 2003, Alice Joyce, review of Growing Seasons: Half-baked Garden Tips, Cheap Advice on Marriage, and Questionable Theories on Motherhood, p. 1729.

Library Journal, May 1, 2003, Rachel Collins and Mirela Roncevic, "What to Expect: Six Books Discuss the Art of Mothering," p. 142.

Publishers Weekly, September 9, 1996, review of Annie's Garden Journal, p. 75.