Norma Fox Mazer (1931–) Biography

Born 1931, in New York, NY; Education: Attended Antioch College and Syracuse University. Politics: "I believe in people—despise institutions while accepting their necessity."

Career

Writer, 1964–.

Honors Awards

National Book Award nomination, 1973, for A Figure of Speech; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, University of Wisconsin, 1975, for Saturday the Twelfth of October, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories; American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book citation, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, and 1988, for After the Rain; Christopher Award, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories; New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year list, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, 1984, for Downtown; School Library Journal Best Books of the Year list, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, 1997, for When She Was Good, 1979, for Up in Seth's Room, 1988, for After the Rain; ALA Best Books for Young Adults list, 1976, for Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, 1977, (with Harry Mazer) for The Solid Gold Kid, 1979, for Up in Seth's Room, 1983, for Someone to Love, 1984, for Downtown, 1988, for After the Rain, 1989, for Silver, 1993, for Out of Control, 1998, for When She Was Good; Children's Book Council/International Reading Association Children's Choice, 1978, for The Solid Gold Kid, 1986, for A, My Name Is Ami, 1989, for Heartbeat; ALA Best of the Best Books list, 1970–83, for Up in Seth's Room; Austrian Children's Books list of honor, 1982, for Mrs. Fish, Ape, and Me, the Dump Queen; Edgar Award, Mystery Writers of America, 1982, for Taking Terri Mueller; German Children's Literature prize, 1982, for Mrs. Fish, Ape, and Me, the Dump Queen; New York Public Library Books for the Teenage List, 1984, for Downtown, 1989, for Silver, 1990, for Heartbeat and for Waltzing on Water, 1991, for Babyface, 1994, for Out of Control, and, 1995, for Missing Pieces; California Young Readers Medal, 1985, for Taking Terri Mueller; Iowa Teen Award, 1985–86, for When We First Met, 1989, for Silver; Association of Booksellers for Children Choice, Canadian Children's Books Council Choice, Horn Book Fanfare Book, and Newbery Honor Book, all 1988, all for After the Rain; ALA One Hundred Best of the Best Books, 1968–1993, Norma Fox Mazerfor Silver and for The Solid Gold Kid; German Literature Prize, 1989, for Heartbeat; American Booksellers Pick of the Lists, 1990, for Babyface, 1992, for Bright Days, Stupid Nights, 1993, for Out of Control, 1994, for Missing Pieces; International Reading Association Teacher's Choice, for Babyface, Bright Days, Stupid Nights, Out of Control, and Missing Pieces; Editor's Choice, Booklist, 1997, for When She was Good.

Writings

YOUNG ADULT FICTION

I, Trissy, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted, Dell (New York, NY), 1986.

A Figure of Speech, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1973.

Saturday the Twelfth of October, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1975.

Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1976.

(With husband, Harry Mazer) The Solid Gold Kid, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1977.

Up in Seth's Room, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1979.

Mrs. Fish, Ape, and Me, the Dump Queen, Dutton (New York, NY), 1980.

Taking Terri Mueller, Avon/Morrow (New York, NY), 1981.

Summer Girls, Love Boys, and Other Short Stories, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1982.

When We First Met, Four Winds (New York, NY), 1982.

Downtown, Avon/Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.

Someone to Love, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1983.

Supergirl (screenplay novelization), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1984.

A, My Name Is Ami, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1986.

Three Sisters, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1986.

After the Rain, Morrow (New York, NY), 1987.

B, My Name Is Bunny, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1987.

Silver, Morrow (New York, NY), 1988.

(With Harry Mazer) Heartbeat, Bantam (New York, NY), 1989.

Babyface, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

C, My Name Is Cal, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1990.

D, My Name Is Danita, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1991.

E, My Name Is Emily, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Harry Mazer) Bright Days, Stupid Nights, Morrow (New York, NY), 1992.

Out of Control, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

Missing Pieces, Morrow (New York, NY), 1995.

When She Was Good, Arthur A. Levine Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Crazy Fish, Morrow (New York, NY), 1998.

Good Night, Maman, Harcourt Brace (San Diego, CA), 1999.

Girlhearts, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

What I Believe, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2005.

OTHER

(With Axel Daimler) When We First Met (novel), Learning Corporation of America, 1984.

(Editor, with Margery Lewis) Waltzing on Water: Poetry by Women, Dell (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor, with Jacqueline Woodson) Just a Writer's Thing: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the National Book Foundation's 1995 Summer Writing Camp, National Book Foundation (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Nathan Aaseng, Myra C. Livingston, and others) Courage: How We Face Challenges, Troll Communications (Mahwah, NJ), 1997.

Stories and essays anthologized in Sixteen … Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1984; Short Takes, by Elizabeth Segal, Lothrop (New York, NY), 1986; Visions: Nineteen Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults, edited by Gallo, Delacorte, 1987; Authors' Insights: Turning Teenagers into Readers and Writers, edited by Gallo, Boynton/Cook (Portsmouth, NH), 1992; Leaving Home: Stories, edited by Hazel Rochman and Darlene Z. McCampbell, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997; Stay True: Short Stories about Strong Girls, edited by Marilyn Singer, 1998; Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Short Stories by Censored Writers, edited by Judy Blume, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1999; Hot Flashes: Women Writers on the Change of Life, edited by Lynne Taetzsch; Ultimate Sports, edited by Gallo; and Night Terrors, edited by Lois Duncan. Contributor of stories, articles, and essays to magazines, including Jack and Jill, Ingenue, Calling All Girls, Child Life, Boys and Girls, Redbook, English Journal, Voice of Youth Advocates, Signal, Top of the News, and ALAN Review.

Adaptations

Mazer's novels recorded on audio cassette and released by Listening Library include Taking Terri Mueller, 1986, Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories, 1987, and After the Rain, 1988. The novel When We First Met was filmed for television by Home Box Office, 1984.

Work in Progress

Several novels; a short story.

Sidelights

"It's not hard to see why Norma Fox Mazer has found a place among the most popular writers for young adults these days," observed Suzanne Freeman in the Washington Post Book World. "At her best, Mazer can cut right to the bone of teenage troubles and then show us how the wounds will heal. She can set down the everyday scenes of her characters' lives in images that are scalpel sharp," the critic continued, adding that "what's apparent throughout all of this is that Mazer has taken great care to get to know the world she writes about. She delves into the very heart of it with a sure and practiced hand." Mazer's many acclaimed books for teen readers include After the Rain, A Figure of Speech, Silver, and Good Night, Maman.

New York Times Book Review contributor Barbara Wersba described Mazer as "a dazzling writer" who "brings to her work a literacy that would be admirable in any type of fiction." In her National Book Award-nominated A Figure of Speech, Mazer tells the story of an elderly man neglected by all of his family except his granddaughter. "The fine definition of all characters, the plausibility of the situations and the variety of insights into motivation make [the novel] almost too good to be true," Tom Heffernan asserted in Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children's Literature and the Children's Literature Association. "There is no point at which it passes into an area of depiction or explanation that would exceed the experience of a young adolescent. But there is also no point at which the psychological perceptiveness and narrative control would disappoint an adult reader."

Mazer grew up in Glens Falls, New York, the middle daughter in a family of three girls. Her father was a route driver, delivering such things as milk and bread, and the family lived in a succession of apartments and houses. "The year we lived on Ridge Street, when I was eight," stated Mazer in her autobiographical essay for Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS), "I learned to ride a two-wheeler, changed my name (briefly, because I kept forgetting I'd changed it) to the more glamorous Diane, made up triplet brothers in the Navy to impress my new girlfriend, and was caught stealing." School, reading, and boys were her childhood loves, and it was in a new apartment on First Street that she may have realized the possibilities of her imagination: "A girlfriend and I are playing near … wooden steps. I have forgotten the game, although I made it up, but not her words. 'Norma Fox! What an imagination!' And perhaps it was precisely then that I realized that my imagination had some other function than to torment me with witches in doorknobs and lurking figures in the shadows of the stairs."

During Mazer's teen years, her family started calling her the "Cold One," as she began to live more and more in her own world. Feeling like an outsider, Mazer admitted in SAAS that, "were I to be asked to use one word to describe myself then and for years afterward, it would be—eyes. There's a picture of me around thirteen, sitting in a high-backed leather chair, looking out of the corner of my eyes, looking around, watching, a little frightened smile on my face. Along about then, it struck me, a bone-aching truth, that grown-ups—adults, these powerful mysterious people—were all play-acting; they weren't, in fact, any older, any more grown-up than I was."

A job with the school newspaper gave Mazer her first opportunity to write for publication, and writing soon became the focus of her existence at school. "But I wanted to write more than newspaper articles. There was a longing in me, vague,… but real, almost an ache," the novelist recalled. When she was fifteen, Mazer met her future husband, Harry Mazer, for the first time. He was a friend of her older sister, and at the age of twenty-one, he seemed ancient to Mazer. Two years later, they met again, and a much-more-confident Mazer was determined that Harry should fall in love with her. Harry thought that Mazer was too young, though, and she had to work at making him notice her—the couple fell in and out of love and quarreled many times before finally getting married.

During the early part of their marriage, the Mazers worked at "boring" jobs and tried to learn how to cook. Three children soon became part of the family, and Mazer took on the role of Mommy. "I had almost forgotten Norma," she remembered. "One day, looking around at the houseful of kids and listening to the never ending cries of Mommy! Mom! Mama!, it occurred to me that the day I'd been both putting off and waiting for—the day when I was all grown up—had arrived without my noticing. Indeed, it must have been here for quite a while. And that famous question 'What are you going to do when you grow up?' had not gone away." A serious talk with her husband followed, and both Mazers revealed a desire to be a writer. They decided that if they were really serious about writing, they had to do at least a little every day. So, for three years, the Mazers spent an hour at the end of each day writing. Money from an insurance settlement finally enabled them to write full-time. "It was mildly terrifying," revealed Mazer in her autobiographical essay. "I had some days when I sat in front of the typewriter and shook because I couldn't think of what to write next."

To support the family, the Mazers wrote for the women's true confessions market. These stories were presented as first-person confessions of women who had made serious mistakes in their lives, but were actually the work of professional writers. During the following years, the Mazers each wrote one of these 5,000-to-8,000-word stories every week, leaving little time to devote to the writing of novels. In 1970 Mazer managed to find the time to pen her novel I, Trissy, and it was published the following year. A Figure of Speech came two years later and received a National Book Award nomination. "I remember meeting a member of the National Book Award committee some time after A Figure of Speech had received a … nomination and hearing him say to me, '… and you just came out of nowhere.' I laughed. My 'nowhere' had been the ten years I'd spent writing full time and learning the craft."

Mazer has been especially acclaimed for her young-adult novels, some of which she has written with her husband, and although her fictional characters are not always likable, they are believable young people struggling with challenges while teetering on the verge of adulthood. Her 1981 book Taking Terri Mueller earned Mazer an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America although she had not intended it as a mystery. The book follows Terri Mueller and her father as they wander from town to town, never staying in one place for more than a year. Although Terri is happy with her father, she is old enough to wonder why he will never talk about her mother, who supposedly died ten years ago. An overheard discussion leads Terri to discover that she had been kidnapped by her father after a bitter custody battle. "The unfolding and the solution of the mystery [of the truth about Terri's mother] are effectively worked," remarked a Horn Book reviewer; "filled with tension and with strong characterization, the book makes compelling reading." Freeman similarly observed that despite the potential for simplifying Terri's conflict, "Mazer does not take the easy way out in this book. There are no good guys or bad guys. There are no easy answers." The critic concluded, "We believe in just about everything Terri does, because Mazer's writing makes us willing to believe. She wins us completely with this finely wrought and moving book."

In her Newbery Honor Book After the Rain Mazer returns to the subject of a elderly man dying; but in this instance, grandfather Izzy rebuffs his loving family, and granddaughter Rachel must exert herself to build a relationship with him. As it becomes clear to her that Izzy is dying and needs companionship, Rachel decides to regularly spend her free time with him. "It's surprising that she should make such a decision," claimed Washington Post Book World contributor Cynthia Samuels, "but once the reader accepts her choice and begins to join her on her daily visits with the crotchety old man, the story becomes both moving and wise." The result, continued the critic, is a book that "deals with death and loss in an original and sensitive way." Carolyn Meyer, however, felt that there is a lack of tension in the story: "you never really worry that Rachel won't do the right thing," she wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In contrast, a Kirkus Reviews critic suggested that "what distinguishes this book, making it linger in the heart, are the realistic portrayals of the tensions, guilt, and sudden, painfully moving moments involved in Rachel's and Izzy's situations." As a Horn Book reviewer concluded, Izzy's "harsh, rough personality [is] so realistic and recognizable that we feel we have known him and can understand the sorrow that overcomes Rachel. [After the Rain is] a powerful book, dealing with death and dying and the strength of family affection."

With Good Night, Maman Mazer ventures into historical fiction. The young-adult novel centers around twelve-year-old Karin, who, amid World War II, must struggle to find freedom and begin a new life without her beloved mother. The Nazi invaders have sent Karin's father to a prison in Poland and Karin, her brother, and her mother are in hiding in an attic. When they are told they must leave, the children head south. Karin and her brother eventually board a ship headed to America, leaving their ill-stricken mother behind. "This moving World War II story is neither highly dramatic nor politically charged. It is the very personal and immediate experience of a young girl grappling with the loss of her old life and a new life that changes daily," explained Lauren Adams in Horn Book. A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that "the strength of this novel lies in its intimate recognition of the way adolescents think and feel." Mazer explained in a Teen Reads online interview that writing historical fiction is difficult because a writer must fit a fictional character into an actual event. "I had to write this novel over completely four times, and this was because I was working out how to balance fiction and history," she remarked. To prepare to write her book, Mazer said, "I read a fair number of books, most of them memoirs of people who had lived through the Holocaust. What struck me was that despite the numbing universality of that murderous time, each person's story, each survivor's story, was unique, distinct … my intention in writing this book was not to write history, but to write the unique history of an individual, albeit a fictional one."

Like Good Night, Maman, Girlhearts deals with a young girl's loss of a parent. Sarabeth Silver is devastated by the death of her mother, the only parent and family member she has ever known. With no one to turn to, Sarabeth decides to track down the extended family members who had turned their back on her mother after she became pregnant at age sixteen. "With a pitch-perfect intensity, Mazer captures the fractured sense of loss, of self, of time, that comes with a death in the family," explained GraceAnn A. DeCandido in Booklist. Writing in School Library Journal, Susie Paige noted that "the theme of death and renewal is not a new one, but Mazer's characters deal with the process in a realistic, heartrending manner." In Publishers Weekly a reviewer praised the novel for conveying its author's "intimate recognition" of teen emotions, adding that Mazer "conveys the heroine's feelings of shock, numbness, loneliness and powerlessness with her usual authenticity."

Mazer melds prose with poetry in her 2005 novel What I Believe. The book tracks middle-schooler Vickie Marnet's changing world after her middle-aged father is laid off from his corporate job and the Marnet family falls from affluence into depression and struggling financial circumstances. Moving from the family's comfortable suburban home to a crowded city apartment, Vickie must now deal with a new school while her mother heads off to work and a renter moves into the spare bedroom to help pay the rent. Consisting of diary entries, e-mails, and Vickie's poetry, Mazer's text reflects the girl's "struggles to master the dramatic changes in her life," according to Booklist reviewer Holly Koelling. A Kirkus Reviews writer praised "Mazer's ear for teen language," while in School Library Journal Denise Moore asserted that readers will be "drawn into the girl's struggle" and "taken with the novel's free-flowing style and revelations."

Like her novels, Mazer's short-story collections, which include Dear Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories and Summer Girls, Love Boys and Other Short Stories, have also won her many readers. "Clearly, Mazer appreciates the short-story form, with its narrow focus and spotlit moments," commented a Kirkus Reviews writer about Dear, Bill, Remember Me? and Other Stories. The eight short stories in the collection deal with young girls going through a period of crisis: In "Up on Fong Mountain," Jessie strives to be accepted as something other than an extension of her boyfriend, while eighteen-year-old Louise in "Guess Whose Friendly Hands" knows she is dying of cancer and wishes her mother and sister would accept her reality. Mazer's tales "are clearly broadcast on a young teenager's wavelength, with the signal unobtrusively amplified as in good YA novels," contended a Kirkus Reviews contributor.

Bruce Bennett, writing in the Nation, noted that Summer Girls, Love Boys and Other Short Stories "is accessible to teenagers as well as adults. Most of the characters are young people," the critic elaborated, "but Mazer writes about them with an affectionate irony that older readers will appreciate." Because Mazer "has the skill to reveal the human qualities in both ordinary and extraordinary situations as young people mature," stated New York Times Book Review contributor Ruth I. Gordon, "… it would be a shame to limit their reading to young people, since they can show an adult reader much about the sometimes painful rite of adolescent passage into adulthood." Strengthening the effect of Mazer's collections is that they are "written specifically as a book, a fact which gives the stories an unusual unity and connectedness," related Bennett.

As Mazer noted in SAAS, there is "a kind of mystery" in all of her books. "I write and my readers read to find out the answers to questions, secrets, problems," she explained, "to be drawn into the deepest mystery of all—someone else's life." Freeman asserted that. "in its sharpest moments, Mazer's writing can etch a place in our hearts," and in her Top of the News essay, Mazer declared: "I love stories. I'm convinced that everyone does, and whether we recognize it or not, each of us tells stories. A day doesn't pass when we don't put our lives into story. Most often these stories are … of the moment. They are the recognition, the highlighting of … our daily lives…. In my own life, it seems that events are never finished until I've either told them or written them."