Please join us for a Q&A with Mischa Berlinski, author of the novels Mona Acts Out, Peacekeeping, and Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Mischa is the author of Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Peacekeeping. He has written for the New York Review of Books, Men’s Journal, and Harper’s Magazine, and his writing has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. He lives in Istanbul.
Mischa’s latest novel, Mona Acts Out, was featured in our February 12, 2025 issue.
Please use this space to ask Mischa questions about his work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Mischa, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi Kim! Hi fellow BookBrowsers! I’m Mischa Berlinski. I’ve written three novels: Fieldwork, which was about a murder in northern Thailand; Peacekeeping, about an election in rural Haiti; and Mona Acts Out, my most recent novel, about a hectic day in the life on an actress in New York. I’m very happy to answer any questions you have about these books, or about any thing else at all.
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Thanks, Mischa! So, first question: Mona Acts Out is about an aging Shakespearean actress, set during the height of the #MeToo movement. What was the genesis for the novel?
I was impressed with the intimate relationship you seem to have with Shakespeare’s works. Where did that come from? Have you always loved his plays and sonnets?
Much of the book is told from Mona’s perspective. I thought you captured an aging actress perfectly, describing her journey from landing younger roles to those that usually go to older performers. Is she based on someone you know?
What are your thoughts about how you chose to write about a #MeToo experience? While the way you conveyed Vanessa’s experience certainly showed how dramatically – and negatively – a woman could be impacted by the propositions of a powerful boss, Mona’s reactions to Milton’s advances portray him in a more forgiving light (in fact, it caused a lot of friction between Mona and her niece Rachel). How did your readers react to this more balanced approach?
Hi Kim. I think I’d like to amalgamate my reply to this question and to your next question in one response. Shakespeare came to me as a revelation in my early forties. I had read a few Shakespearean plays in high school – I remember writing an essay on the symbolism of Othello’s handkerchief – and then again in college I took a year-long survey course, from which my chief memory is attempting to read a dozen of the plays in a single night in preparation for the final exam. Needless to say, this was not a great success, and very little Shakespeare stuck with me in later life.
Then came John Barton and his Playing Shakespeare series on YouTube. If the before-Barton Shakespeare was black and white, the after-Barton Shakespeare was technicolor. If you’ve ever wondered (perhaps a little timidly or abashedly) just what the excitement is about Shakespeare, then may I suggest stopping reading this interview and spending the next nine hours watching John Barton and his actors? I’ll wait.
I presume now that nine hours have passed. I’ve just been sitting here. I’m supposing that you have just watched all nine hours of John Barton and his Playing Shakespeare; you might well have watched it twice. So now, I am supposing also, you are on fire with those actors, all of them so young and beautiful; you have Shakespearean verse on the tongue; you are mad to talk about the plays, the characters, the poetry. You have thoughts on meter and rhyme, irony, and ambiguity. You might well feel, if you are anything like me, that those nine hours were an introduction not just to Shakespeare but to the art of acting; not just the art of acting but to Art itself. You want to collar your spouse, your mother, your dog and shout at them: I get it now.
Now if you are anything like me – and who would ever write a novel supposing the reader to be different? – you will begin to spend hours fantasizing about a Shakespearean company of your own. This was very fun. I had a notebook and no clear idea for a novel; I just wanted to be in the company of other human beings–albeit imaginary ones–as excited about the same things as I was. I wanted to be around people who thought hours and hours about just where to breathe in certain speeches of Shakespeare, and what Hamlet really meant when said, “Words, words, words.”
I had no idea at all that this would be Mona’s story until she took it over. I woke up with her that Thanksgiving morning and like the consummate actress that she is, she took her cameo and stole the entire show. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I see now that I’m drifting off to a different question–I’ll pick up this thread there.
Mona is based on particular character at all, but I think every woman in my orbit thinks she has some claim to ownership over Mona. There is no surer way to throw sand in the gears of fiction production that to overthink these questions: Mona came into existence day by day over years, with a thousand small decisions, some of them invisible to anyone but me. Then she started making decisions on her own.
I didn’t want to write a novel about #MeToo. These were not issues that were foremost in my mind when I started it. But novels do have a life of their own, and they are influenced by the controversies in the air as they are written. I found myself reading a lot of #MeToo stories, and my impression of so many of these stories was that they lacked the ambiguity that I think characterizes so much of our human interactions. I felt that they were complicated stories, but being told in very simplistic fashion. I wanted to introduce an element of doubt into the story, a sense of uncertainty.
I’m not sure that I entirely agree with your characterization of Milton’s influence on Vanessa. She has certainly come to tell herself that she was harmed–but is that how she would have characterized the experience at the time? Is it true? I think she achieved a moment of greatness thanks to Milton that Mona desperately longed for: would Vanessa have become Mona if she hadn’t had that moment of greatness, forever seeking that kind of artistic transcendence? I don’t know the answers. I know that almost always relationships between men and women are very complicated, and the relationship between Milton and Vanessa, and Milton and Mona, and Mona and I, are no exception.
As for my readers’ reactions–perhaps they should weigh in here? It’s really their call. I’d be very happy to respond.
Thanks for posting Playing Shakespeare. I haven’t watched the entire thing, but I think it’s probably in my future. I was fortunate enough to see my first Shakespeare play (Macbeth) on a high school field trip to the Cleveland Playhouse and I’ve been in love with his works ever since. I’m eager to see some of the actors in their youth.
I’m wondering if John Barton is at least in part the inspiration for your novel. He looks like he could play Milton. And then there’s this line: “Each actor and his experience is worth many books.”
It sounds like creating the book wasn’t a quick process, and I know that your books were published several years apart, too. How does writing a novel work for you? Do you have several ideas that roll around in your head for a while, or does inspiration strike and then you know that’ll be the subject of your next book? Do you have a good idea about the way the narrative will develop before you start writing, or do you start writing immediately, performing a lot of revisions over time?
What was the most challenging aspect of creating Mona and her world?
I find Mona’s appearance to you fascinating. Did she just appear in your mind as a sketch or as a “full figure” so to speak? How did she reveal her persona? Gradually or with a dramatic entrance? This phenomena is a tribute to the power of our creative minds. Might we all listen or wait for a vision? Your experience seems similar to some musicians who hear an entire song playing in their mind as if it wrote itself.
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Mona Acts Out is your third novel, after Fieldwork (2006) and Peacekeeping (2016). It feels structurally and thematically much different than your first two books (Mona is set in the US while the others are set in more exotic locales, the story is set over a short time period, much of it is what’s going on in Mona’s mind, etc.). Did you make a conscious effort to vary your style for this one?
Which was your favorite book to write? Which was your least favorite? Which were you most proud of?
Hi Nan! Thanks so much for the question, and I wish I had a wholly satisfying answer to give you. The truth is that creativity is as much a mystery to me as to you. I suspect that this is true for every writer. In the case of Mona, she only really came alive to me when I placed her in a very particular circumstance–in her bedroom with the door closed, listening to her in-laws rustling in the kitchen. It took me a long time to put her in that room, in that moment. The novel began with Mona for a long time at the first rehearsal of her new production of Antony and Cleopatra. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get that to go anywhere. But once she was in the bedroom, everything changed, and I felt that I could keep making discoveries about her, her character, her art, her way of looking at the world for a long time.
This anecdote reminds me of a little trick that I use when characters are hesitant to reveal themselves. I recommend it to anyone who’s trying to write. Try and imagine what’s in your protagonist’s bedside drawers, or in their bathroom cabinet, or some other secret place in their home. In this novel, I tried to show Mona’s bedside drawers, Vanessa’s bathroom closet, and Milton’s also, although I don’t know if those details all survived into a final draft. I think it’s always interesting for a reader to see the character’s secret places. Once you know what’s in those secret places, characters start to emerge. In Mona’s case, she found the pills from her sister’s hospice kit.
That said, the whole process, for me, at least, is very slow. I’ll write characters into situations where they don’t belong, or which don’t reveal much about their personality, and I’ll keep them there a mulishly long time, waiting for inspiration to strike. I was in the wrong place with Mona (the rehearsal room) for a long time–I thought rehearsal was my subject, and it turned out to be something else. I wish that I could write faster and make fewer mistakes as I wrote. But when the characters do find themselves in the right place and time–then yes, it’s very exciting. It can be quite surprising what comes out of their mouths, or what they do.
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I was very intimidated by the prospect of writing a novel set in the world of theater. I’ve never been in any was associated with the the theater in any way–before writing this novel, I had never met an actor or been a part of a production. I don’t even know if I had ever seen a professional play! So trying to write about the world of New York theater, trying to write scenes set in the rehearsal rooms of professional productions – all of this was quite scary for me. It took me a few years of talking to actors, directors, playwrights and theater professionals before I felt confident enough to give it a try, and of course, I read every book I could find by anyone in the theater world. But I felt like a tremendous imposter for a long time.
I read that you lived in Thailand while writing Fieldwork and in Haiti when writing Peacekeeping. Were these novels autobiographical at all? And how did you end up in Istanbul, your current country of residence?