Interview with Lara Reznik

Lara Reznik, a native New Yorker, attended college at the University of New Mexico where she studied under esteemed authors Rudolfo Anaya and Tony Hillerman. Ambidextrous from birth, Lara preferred her right-brained creative side, but discovered she could make a better living with her left-brain skills so entered the I.T. field in 1985. Lara launched her debut novel, The Girl From Long Guyland on Amazon last November. The novel has received rave editorial reviews and consistently ranked the #1 spot in Suspense, #1 in Contemporary Fiction, and #4 overall “Free Books,” during it’s Amazon Kindle Select Promotional Days 11/16-11/20. In addition to her novels, Lara has written and optioned three screenplays.

The Digital Ink Spot: Tell the readers about your book, The Girl From Long Guyland
Lara Reznik: Readers have told me that The Girl From Long Guyland reads like memoir-meets-psychological-thriller. Set against a 1969 psychedelic love-in backdrop, the story is shared through the eyes of I.T. executive, Laila Levin, when decades later, an unsolved murder pulls her reluctantly into her past. Facing a dramatic collision of then and now, Laila is forced to make choices that endanger her marriage, family, profession and ethics.

The Digital Ink Spot:  How much of you is the main character, Laila Levin?

Lara Reznik: This is a great question. Numerous people have told me that the characters, in both the hippie days of the late ‘60s and the corporate world of 2012, seem very believable and real. A few Amazon reviewers are convinced the novel is my autobiography. I’ll take that as a compliment that I was successful in creating a fictive world with a plot and cast of characters that are composites of people I’ve known. I’m at an age when I’ve begun reflecting on different periods of my life and examining what I’ve learned from them. For me, the late sixties was an aberration from the rest of my relatively conservative life. I wasn’t near as naïve or crazy as Laila, but I was a quintessential hippie, feminist, and anti-war protestor. Evidently, the novel has struck a chord with other baby boomers’ memories.

The Digital Ink Spot: The book cover is simple yet tells a lot, what do you want readers to get from it?
Lara Reznik: The cover is the result of a collaboration with two members of my critique group, authors Cynthia Stone and Tosh McIntosh. It was Cindy’s brilliant idea which Tosh spent endless hours fine-tuning in Photoshop. Marijuana leaves falling from a woman executive’s briefcase are symbolic of how Laila is forced to deal with the dark secret from her hippie past that has come back to haunt her now.

The Digital Ink Spot: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Lara Reznik: It often takes the threat of losing everything to appreciate what you’ve got! As corny as it sounds, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Laila comes to realize, “There’s no place like home.”

The Digital Ink Spot: What can readers expect from you in the future?
Lara Reznik: More novels. I’m working on two. The first is a novelization of my screenplay, The M&M Boys. It’s about a troubled Little Leaguer who meets Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle as they compete to break Babe Ruth's home run record in the summer of '61. The second, Dance of Deception, is a thriller set in the mid-seventies about a wealthy young woman who enters the dark world of Go-Go dancing, while a serial killer, imitating the Son of Sam, targets exotic dancers in Manhattan.

http://www.larareznik.com/