Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep was the winner in the LGBTQ+ (Non Fiction) category of the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Awards, where undiscovered talent meets people with the power to make a difference.
Following find an interview with author Lori Horvitz.
It’s an honor to receive this award! Thank you to my friends and family for your support, to New Meridian Arts for taking a chance on my book and publishing it, and to all my writer friends who have encouraged my writing and offered helpful feedback. I also want to thank the IndieReader Discovery Award for choosing my book as the winner in the LGBTQ+ Nonfiction category!!!
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep. Published in 2023.
What’s the book’s first line?
It was cheaper to take a night train to Oslo than pay for a hotel, and on the train from Frankfort, I met a soft-spoken blonde guy, the kind of guy who majors in business and takes up golf, the kind of guy who rows for his college crew team, who eventually takes over his father’s business.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Collect Call to My Mother follows Lori Horvitz’ experiences as a queer Jewish New Yorker living in the South, looking for love in the internet age. When she teaches a class of queer college students who look to her as a role model, what they don’t know is that she spent her twenties and thirties in the closet and leapt from one relationship disaster to the next. Each of her turbulent trysts helps unearth the roots of her poor judgment: a chaotic upbringing, compounded by her mother’s emotional distance and early death. In these essays exploring themes of love, family, and grief, Horvitz gradually embraces who she is and finds a healthy, long-term relationship.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
Once I finished the first essay of the collection, “Collect Call to My Mother,” I became obsessed with trying to unearth the psychological connections between my mother’s behaviors and that of the many partners I chose. Once I found the key, I was able to understand my unhealthy (yet familiar) patterns and change my behaviors and find happiness.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
A friend of mine said that my writing reminds her of a cross between David Sedaris and Anne Lamott.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
Someone should read my book if they want to be entertained, enlightened, and educated about how the narrator chose terrible partners because of not being brought up in a nurturing environment. But the narrator also found the strength to free herself from her history by understanding and accepting it.
If they made your book into a movie, who would you like to see play the main character(s)?
Natalie Portman.
When did you first decide to become an author?
When I traveled on my own in Europe at 22 and started journaling and writing poetry.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
My first collection, The Girls of Usually, came out in 2015.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
English Professor.
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
An hour or more a day.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
It’s freeing to make sense of my life through writing. It’s easier to write than not to write.
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
Virginia Woolf.