Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at eighteen. She is the author of three previous novels, Forty Rooms, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of The New York Times‘ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post‘s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, DC, with her two children.

Listen in as we talk about her upbringing in Moscow and Prague and how she knew she wanted to be a writer at the tender age of four. To that end, every year on her mother’s birthday she’d present her with a typed, illustrated, and bound original book—hearing this made me feel bad about always giving my mother an ashtray for her birthday (to be fair, though, she was a smoker).

We also talk about her journey to the United States at eighteen to study at Emory as well as her path to publishing. Of course, we discuss her new book The Charmed Wife, which has been characterized by CNN as “A modern take on the story of Cinderella, marriage, divorce and love that’s surprising, darkly comedic and enchanting.”

This was a great conversation and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed hosting it. Follow Olga on twitter @olgagrushin and purchase The Charmed Wife wherever books are sold.

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