I was named after a Russian friend of my mother’s. In Poland and Russia the name Marisha is a common term of endearment for the name Mary. One of my favorite novels in high school (when I was going through my proverbial Ayn Rand phase) was her first novel, We the Living, which I loved even more because it featured a Marisha as a character.
Marisha Pessl by David Schulze
I’m a Broadway musical theatre geek. Thanks to my mom and a set of Time Life box set cassette tapes, American musicals were the omnipresent soundtrack to my childhood. The songs of Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Carousel, and Annie Get Your Gun were so inspiring, insight into another world of fantasy, I wanted to be a composer and lyricist when I grew up.
I played the harp as a child. I began in middle school and continued through high school and college on a concert grand pedal harp. In terms of skill I was intermediate at best, but loved the mental challenge of working through a difficult piece of music.
I was raised by an amazing single mother, as well as by my grandmother, in an all-female household that was referred to by friends as the coven. My grandmother traveled the world alone many times beginning in the 1940s, and my mother, who also lived around the globe, always taught me to work hard, strive for excellence, pursue my passions, be endlessly curious, and last but not least, to relish a good Agatha Christie mystery.
I hated sleep-away summer camp. The moment I arrived I spent the majority of my time scheming to get sent home, which included plans to run away, hitchhike, and rub myself head-to-toe with poison ivy, to which I was badly allergic. By the time my grand plan was in place and I was ready to execute, three weeks had passed and it was time to go home.
On my father’s side, I’m half Austrian and my Austrian grandfather was not only a physician and accomplished oil landscape painter, but a master academic fencer with a dueling scar down his cheek. It was called a schmitte and was considered in his day a badge of honor.
My love of words and books began with my mother who always read aloud to my sister and I before bed. That was how I first experienced many of the books that would inspire me as a Young Adult writer: Wind and the Willows, Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia.
I considered being a playwright and actor before deciding to be a novelist. I always pursued every passion that I had and it was a professor in college who told me to choose one profession and do that well, which gave me a clarity of vision that allowed me to work on my craft, my first great love, writing stories.
My mother grew up in Venezuela and I spent a few seminal summers with my family in Caracas and Puerto La Cruz listening to Venezuelan pop, touring the islands by boat, and watching a crazy talent show that I dreamed of trying out for called El Show de Fantastico.
I loved riding horses as a child and for years begged my mother for a horse or even a pony. Instead, she bought me a typewriter.
