DeAngelis, Camille 1980-

PERSONAL:

Born November 1980, in NJ. Education: New York University, B.A., 2002; National University of Ireland, Galway, M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NJ. Agent—Kate Garrick, DeFiore and Company, 72 Spring St., Ste. 304, New York, NY 10012. E-mail—mealey@gmail.com.

CAREER:

HarperCollins, New York, NY, editorial assistant, 2002-04; travel writer and novelist.

WRITINGS:

(Coauthor) Hanging Out in Ireland (travel book), Hungry Minds, 2001.

Mary Modern (novel), Shaye Areheart Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Moon Ireland (travel book), Avalon Travel Publishing (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Camille DeAngelis draws on elements of Irish mythology as well as gothic fiction in her debut novel, Mary Modern. Its protagonist, Lucy Morrigan, is a biological researcher living in a house full of graduate students with her boyfriend, Gray, a classics scholar. Unable to conceive the child she longs for, Lucy resolves to cure her infertility by cloning her grandmother, Mary, implanting the embryo into her womb, and raising the resulting child as her own. But her plans go awry when she gives birth early, via caesarean section, to a twenty-two-year-old version of Mary, who comes to life thinking that it is still 1929 and who retains all of Mary's memories up to that date. Mary must learn to adjust to a new life without Teddy, the beloved husband she remembers just having married. The situation becomes even more complicated when Gray falls in love with Mary and conservative Christian zealots threaten to destroy Lucy's work and career.

Many reviewers noted the story's obvious debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but as DeAngelis explained in an interview posted on her home page, her initial inspiration came from her own family history. One of her great-grandmothers, Anna, had died in childbirth at the age of thirty-three, leaving DeAngelis's maternal grandmother, then five, to the custody of uncaring foster parents. "I looked at my great-grandmother's face [in her engagement photograph]," said DeAngelis, "and wondered what I'd say to her, and what she'd say to me, if through some temporal blip we were granted half an hour in each other's company."

Though she "suspected I was walking a fine line between original and ridiculous," DeAngelis said she took a friend's advice to develop this idea into a novel. Many critics admired the book's exciting narrative and complex themes. In Bookreporter.com, Sarah Rachel Egelman commented that Shelley herself would likely approve of the novel, "with its emphasis on the dangers of irresponsible science, the power of motherhood and the psychological and spiritual identity of living (read: created) individuals." Boston Globe reviewer Diane White, however, pointed out a significant difference between Frankenstein and Mary Modern: while Shelley "warned against the potential excesses of science, DeAngelis's novel takes on political and religious forces that aim to suppress scientific innovation." White enjoyed Mary Modern primarily as a love story that poses complex questions about "love's limits, and its possibilities." Writing in Library Journal, Jyna Scheeren called Mary Modern an elegantly written book that "touches on issues that plague modern life" and "provides an unexpected and satisfying payoff."

DeAngelis told CA: "Reading great books as a child—Anne of Green Gables [by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery] is still my favorite—made me want to write my own someday, and I made my earliest storywriting attempts when I was eight or nine. I wrote bad poetry as a teenager, although one of my poems was good enough to win the literary magazine prize of seventy-five dollars in high school. I had a weekly opinion column in the Washington Square News, the student newspaper at New York University, and it was as an undergraduate that I made my first stab at serious fiction-writing.

"Each of my stories has its own set of influences, literary and otherwise. I read a lot of gothic stories while I was working on Mary Modern, in particular those of the eccentric Anglo-Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. Kate O'Brien was my other major influence—she was one of the most important Irish novelists of the twentieth century. The novel I'm working on now is inspired by [the British novelist] Angela Carter and liberally flavored with [references to the British television comedy] Monty Python. Even more so this time around I've been appropriating tics and witty lines from family, friends, and strangers on trains.

"My writing process isn't at all regimented. When I was working on Mary Modern in graduate school, I would write until five or six o'clock in the morning, fortified by many cups of Barry's tea, but now I do most of my writing in the daytime. Sometimes I type and sometimes I write longhand, but I'm always surrounded by index cards and other bits of paper. My local library is my office, and often good ideas will occur to me as I'm walking there.

"Readers have described my work as smart yet accessible, and I'm going to keep trying to bridge that gap between stories that entertain and stories that encourage a bit of rumination. Mary Modern is a yarn that (hopefully) stays with you for awhile after you've finished it, and that's what I'll be aiming for in every novel I write."