The End of Prim: Received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Michelle Tocher.
- What is the name of the book and when was it published? The End of Prim, and it will be launched formally on October 14, 2025
- What’s the book’s first line? “According to the Mayans, the world is coming to an end in just a few days.”
- What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”. The End of Prim is a tragic-comic story about a woman who is meeting her end in every way: the end of her life, and the possible end of the world. She doesn’t want to meet her Maker wearing a flat-brimmed hat and a buttoned-down coat. Her whole life she’s been stuck in a prim and proper persona, focused on doing the right thing, the polite thing. But the effort has only made her disappear, and has left her alone, a solitary observer of herself. Now at the eleventh hour of her life, she’s determined to effect the greatest transformation possible—and go from being a person unknown to anyone, including herself, to one who lives from the very center of herself and the world she loves. Prim’s tender, tragic, funny story is illustrated by comic illustrations by award-winning artist Shelagh Armstrong.
- What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event? I want to say that Prim inspired me to write the book. Just before the end of the Mayan calendar, in December 2012, I was preparing to go to a spa, and Prim showed up. She arrived fully formed in my imagination, and she had a very strong resolve to sort things out before the end of the world. She was with me the whole time I was at the spa and got me laughing and crying. Then she went silent for ten years, and in the middle of COVID she reappeared with new resolve to free herself from acute spiritual isolation.
- What’s the main reason someone should really read this book? Anyone who’s feeling despair over the times and wants to read a simple story that is uplifting, heartbreaking, profound, and funny, this is the story to read. It might even overwrite a dark story we tell ourselves, as one reviewer put it, “dissolving it into atoms and returning it to the stars.”
- What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of? Her flat-brimmed hat is the most distinctive thing about Prim. She longs for intimacy, but to find it she has to come out from the shadows and believe she is lovable. She is a twenty-first century Judith Hearne, an archetypal outsider shut out from the warmth of family life, but instead of dying on the vine (as it were), she ripens and scatters her seed.
- When did you first decide to become an author? I had been writing since early adolescence, but I became an author in the mid 1990s when I realized that I couldn’t find the stories I needed to hear, stories that broke spells, that released us from the ones that imprisoned us.
- Is this the first book you’ve written? It’s my seventh book.
- What do you do for work when you’re not writing? I facilitate storytelling and writing workshops that usually involve guiding people into the myths and fairy tales to find their own reflections and stories. I compose songs and I sing. And I walk into nature every day.
- How much time do you generally spend on your writing? I write in the morning because I still live with chronic pain and only have so much time to sit.
- What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie? Not being recognized by the mainstream publishers. I think they’re missing out!
- What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors? Believe in the power of a good story. If it doesn’t change the world, it will most certainly change you.
- Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why? It depends on who it is and the extent to which they value my mission and work for its own sake.
- Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?) I am not motivated by fortune and frankly I fear fame and everything that comes with it. I’m motivated by the wish to inspire and elevate human conversation.
- Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire? I admire Oliver Sacks, and his exploration of human character and destiny. For me, his book Awakenings was a masterpiece I have read many times. I would add Victor Frankl and Jacques Lusseyran and for what they survived and how they have influenced my faith in the power of goodness.
- Which book do you wish you could have written? Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks.