marnie mueller

The Showgirl and the Writer, A Friendship Forged in the Aftermath of the Japanese American Incarceration, by Marnie Mueller, is a hybrid memoir/biography. It encompasses Mueller's own story, beginning at her birth to Caucasian parents in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security Camp in Northern California, and tells the tale of her long friendship with Mary Mon Toy, a Nisei performer who was incarcerated in the Minidoka Japanese American Camp in Idaho during WWII. The two met by chance in 1994. By then Mueller was a published author and Mary Mon Toy by necessity of old age, had retired from an unusually successful career on stage and television, for an Asian American actor of her time. After Ms. Mon Toy's death, Mueller penned the previously untold story of Mon Toy's fierce determination to put the Incarceration behind and her precipitous rise as a working actor.

A discussion of the moral dilemma involved in revealing a subject's secret in a biographical work.

A BOOKSENSE 76 SELECTION, Spring 2002

This novel is a deeply moving tale of subterranean conflicts between a mother and her only child, of duty and commitment and honor to one's parents even when one feels damaged by them. Sarah must tend to her dying mother. With sorrow, rage, empathy, and touches of humor, the story reaches its irrevocable conclusion in a death scene where Sarah discovers a simple truth that had always eluded her. Sarah comes to terms with her mother and her past, finding at the end of her long journey both consolation and love.

GUSTAVAS MEYERS OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD 2000, Honorable Mention

This powerful novel tells the tragic and dramatic story of Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp during World War II. It is narrated from the unique insider view of Denton Jordan, a conscientious objector, and his wife Esther, who have been working in the camp. In this gripping tale of the disintgration of loyalty, love, and friendship, we experience a disturbing piece of American history.

In the course of writing her historical novel, "The Climate of the Country," which was loosely based on her parents' experience working in the Tule Lake Japanse American Segregation Camp in northern California, Marnie Mueller came upon a trove of archival material about their time in the camp. The essay depicts the struggle which ensued for the author when fiction hit up against reality.

A 1994 BARNES AND NOBLE DISCOVER GREAT NEW WRITERS CHOICE, WINNER OF A 1995 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD,AND RECIPIENT OF A 1995 MARIA THOMAS AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING FICTION, a 1994 NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY "BEST BOOKS FOR THE TEEN AGE" and a NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "NEW AND NOTEWORTHY IN PAPERBACK"

Green Fires is a gripping novel, set in 1969, that has as its backdrop the first clashes between indigenous peoples and international oil companies in the Amazon rainforest. A disillusioned Kennedy-era Peace Corps volunteer returns to Ecuador where she finds a menacing and mysterious trail which she determinedly follows--ever deeper into the jungle--uncovering a sinister secret of international dimensions.