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Hello out there—

I am so pleased to be blogging for Penguin this week. It feels a bit
surreal: to set the scene, it is just before 6 am in Victoria, British Columbia, where I live, and my cat is circling my chair, meowing furiously, desperate to be on my lap.

Victoria is a small city on the southern tip of Vancouver Island—a peninsula on an island is how locals describe it. Basically, to get here you travel west across Canada: further, further, further still.
When you hit the Pacific Ocean, you keep going. And then here we are, an island about the size of New Jersey, most of it remote in a brown bear, cougar kind of way, and then some of it filled with really good coffee shops and 1950s ranch homes.

I think that sums it up.

All this is a long way from Boro Park, Brooklyn, where my novel, Sima's Undergarments for Women, which will be released in paperback next week, is set.

I grew up in Brooklyn.  In Flatbush, actually, but my mom grew up in Boro Park, and when I was young she'd take me back to her old neighborhood to shop.  Shopping in Boro Park—for my clothing, my mother's shoes,  my brother's suits (looking back I have no idea why he needed so many suits)—meant going to independent stores where the owners pinched my cheeks and gossiped with my mom while I loitered beneath the clothing racks.

One more thing: those stores were run out of peoples' basements.

I'm sure this is a typical childhood experience, I didn't realize this was strange until I grew up and realized other people did not go shopping in basements.

But by then I was hooked.

There was one particular store, a lingerie shop. At first it was a horrifying place—my first bra, and the older woman fitting me brusquely felt me up and sold me beige triangles when I wanted pink, and with a bow—but again, as I got older I realized what a neat trick it was to be properly fitted, in complete no-nonsense fashion, for a bra.

"You know," my mother said to me one day, as we were leaving the shop, "you should really set a story in a shop like this."

And so: Sima was born, and with her the only novel to be set in a basement bra-shop in Brooklyn that I've come across.

I'm so glad to get to spend the next few days blogging about Sima, because I miss my old character crowd in the basement. And I miss Brooklyn, too, and all those independent stores, basement or not.

Over the next week I'll be talking a bit about each character in Sima's Undergarments for Woman: what drew me to each of them, what drives each of them, how getting to know my characters changed over the course of the novel, and how the ways in which I think of them now has been altered by reader responses to the book.

I can't wait, and hope you'll continue to read along with me.