Thirty Girls (Minot)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 7, 1956
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Prix Femina Etranger; O. Henry Prize; Pushcart Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Susan Mino is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys (1986), was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine. (From the publisher.)

Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart."

Reviewing her novella "Rapture" in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction," and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart." About Lust, Jill Franks observes that Minot...

begins with short, simple sentences, building gradually to longer ones to create the inevitable conclusion: men don't love like women do. Her logic appears in simple two-or three-liners that capture a sense of futility...Do not look for a happy, mutual, heterosexual relationship in Minot. You will not find it.

Minot has also co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty (1996) with Bernardo Bertolucci, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name, 2007), written with Michael Cunningham. (From Wikipedia.)