Born in Poland, Lisa Appignanesi grew up in Paris and Montreal, before coming to Britain, initially as a graduate student in comparative literature. She wrote her PhD thesis on Proust, Henry James, and Robert Musil (published by Vision Press), and then moved to New York where she worked as a writer in a social research agency - a stint which resulted in a book about the then emerging counter culture: Dialogue of the Generations (Science Books - co-authored with Douglas and Monica Holmes, the heads of the agency). After that, it was back to Britain and the University of Essex, where she became a lecturer in American and European Studies. This was followed by a stint at New England College in Sussex. In 1976, while she was still lecturing and writing (Cabaret, Studio Vista, 1975 - a history of this radical 'continental' form which mingled high and popular culture with a generous dab of satire and politics; second edition from Methuen, 1984, entitled Cabaret - The First Hundred Years), she became a founding member of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative - a pioneering group which had John Berger as one of its members and originated the Beginners Cartoon Strip Documentary Texts, Freud for Beginners, et al.).
In 1980 she left university teaching to become Director of Talks and Seminars at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. During her ten years at the ICA, the talks and conference programme gained an international reputation as an intellectual hothouse which focussed debate on the arts and politics, theory, literature, and popular culture in all its manifestations from film to fashion. She also launched and edited the Documents series (which included the books Postmodernism and Ideas From France (Free Association Books, 1989/1990), a magazine record of some of the most important of the ICA Talks series; and a video series of Writers in Conversation. In 1986, she became Deputy Director of the ICA and also headed up its television arm, a small independent production house which made a variety of programmes for the BBC and Channel Four - including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, England's Henry Moore, Seductions (four short plays by writers new to television - Jenny Diski, Edmund White, Marina Warner, Geoff Dyer); and various programmes based on the ICA's live events. During these years, she also wrote a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir (Penguin, 1988), which some have named the finest short book on de Beauvoir and was honoured with a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. A number of pseudonymous novels appeared - as well as the first book on the Rushdie affair, The Rushdie File (co-edited with Sarah Maitland, Fourth Estate, 1989). In 1990, she decided to take the plunge and write full time. Since then, a number of best-selling novels have appeared as well as non-fictions. The novels have grown increasingly darker and moved into a psychological thriller genre.
Bibliography
Memory and Desire (HarperCollins, 1991) is the haunting story of a thirty-five year old mystery, which enmeshes its contemporary characters in a hunt for tangled origins. Set in New York and Italy, the story moves back through a past of migrations into the Paris of the surrealists and wartime Poland. Cosmopolitan called it "A superbly plotted saga of passion and heartbreak. Appignanesi will keep you guessing until the last full stop."
Dreams of Innocence (HarperCollins, 1994). Max Bergman, charismatic leader of the environmental movement, has vanished without trace. His acolyte, campaigning journalist Helena Latimer, sets out to find him. What she finds instead of the man who has embodied her dreams is a turbulent history that draws her into the vortex of the Great War and the excesses of a Germany where Nazism is on the rise. This is an epic story of dangerous passions and equally dangerous purities, of male fantasies, of fathers and fatherlands, where Mother Nature wears as many faces as her children wish of her.
A Good Woman (HarperCollins, 1996). Chilling, wise, erotic, A Good Woman is the tale of a femme fatale who tries to shake off the past and its crimes and in the process eerily finds herself stepping into the shoes of the person she has imagined her old childhood friend to be. Sarah Dunant wrote, "This elegant, sophisticated story unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes. Each more tantalising than the last. A Good Woman is that rare thing - a quality popular novel."
The Things We Do For Love (HarperCollins, 1997). Like a perfect spy, scientist Stephen Caldwell has a double life. His wife is ignorant of the fact. Alerted to the possibility of an adultery, she tracks her husband's movements through a mysterious network of contacts from Paris to Prague, only to find herself in an unpredictable world of shifting frontiers - geographic, scientific, and personal.
The Dead of Winter (Bantam, 1999). A deranged assassin has gunned down fourteen women students in Montreal. Celebrated actress, Madelaine Blais is haunted by a sense that somewhere our there, where her filmed image roams so freely, someone is determined to kill her too. Lauded as her best novel to date, The Times wrote, "The Dead of Winter becomes, gradually and grippingly, not just the tale of a search for a woman's killer, but an exploration of obsession and guilt that leads to a shocking conclusion." The Mail on Sunday wrote: "A deductive, pacy narrative with plenty of complex characterisation and psychology. At its pivot is sexual obsession and, of course, murder. A confident, well-handled and moodily atmospheric exercise in the suspension of disbelief."
Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir (Chatto and Windus, 1999). Selected as one of their books of 1999 by both Marina Warner and Roy Foster, Losing the Dead is at once a quest and a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood and growing up as an outsider in a closed community. Appignanesi journeys to Poland to uncover her parents' past - Jews who masqueraded as Aryans during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her exploration of the legacy of the war years on family life, her reflections on the workings of memory in the light of her mother's growing Alzheimer's as well as her recreation of wartime Poland have won Losing the Dead great critical acclaim. "A compassionate and intelligent memoir", "This dramatic story, written with a generosity of spirit and gorgeous flashes of wit, is a voyage of discovery both for the restless dead and Appignanesi's own brave spirit" (The Times).
Sanctuary (Bantam, 2000). When investigative journalist Isabel Morgan vanishes, colleagues and lovers see this as just another gambit in an ever dramatic life. But her friend, Leo is filled with a sense of dread. Convinced that Isabel's analyst holds the key to her disappearance, Leo masquerades as a potential patient. In the process, she discovers more than she set out to know. Danger, in Isabel's world, comes in many guises. Appignanesi draws on her knowledge of competing therapies to create a riveting thriller which probes the workings of memory and friendship and the slippages in identity that intimacy can produce.
And coming soon Paris Requiem - a pacy thriller set in Paris in 1899, a belle époque where battles over race, heredity and madness echo our own day.
Lisa Appignanesi's books have been translated into various languages. She is a frequent broadcaster and reviewer. She recently made a series on The Case of Sigmund Freud for BBC Radio 4. She has translated various books, including the soon to be reissued Oranges for the Son of Alexander Levy by Nella Bielski. She has two children, Josh and Katrina and lives in London.
