Falling in Love with a Mirage: The Millions Interviews Martha Anne Toll
Martha Anne Toll’s debut novel, Three Muses, published today by Regal House, centers on prima ballerina Katya Symanova and psychiatrist John Curtain, whose love story is troubled by each of their fraught relationships with the past. After losing her mother at a young age, Katya hands herself over to relentless discipline and a manipulative partnership with her choreographer, all in pursuit of balletic excellence. John, who was forced as a child to sing to the kommandant of the concentration camp that murdered his family, helps patients but struggles to confront his own past and tainted connection to music. Throughout, the novel and its central love story are inspired and animated by the Greek Muses of Song, Discipline, and Memory.
A professionally trained violist and lifelong ballet devotee, Toll brings her passions to bear on this sweeping tale of music, memory, discipline, and loss. Debuting at 64, after a career dedicated to social and racial justice, she also brings earned wisdom to the human complexities she explores. This is her first novel, but not her first rodeo. Her fiction and essays appear in a wide variety of, ks, the, and elsewhere.
