About the Author
Author, Movie Critic & Buddhist Scholar
Meet the Author
Diana Y. Paul is an award-winning American novelist who dives deep into the complex dynamics of intergenerational families, alternating between love and obligation. Things Unsaid is her critically acclaimed novel about family secrets, lies, obligation, and karma. A Pushcart Prize Nominee, Diana’s novel is a book club favorite.
Her short stories have appeared in literary journals and she is working on her second novel, Deeds Undone, a sequel to Things Unsaid.
Born in Akron, Ohio, and a graduate of Northwestern University with a double major in psychology and philosophy, Diana became a professor of Buddhism at Stanford University with a focus on Buddhism after earning her Ph.D. in Buddhism from the University of Wisconsin. She has written three books on Buddhism and Buddhist sutras and tales.
Diana lives in Carmel, CA with her husband. Besides writing, Diana's other passions are mixed media art, binge-viewing movies and television, and gardening.
Why I Love Writing
I have always loved writing, reading books, and binge-viewing cinema, both movies and television.
Cinema is more visual and visceral while books are more conceptual, internal and cerebral, requiring imagining the characters' appearances and voices. And that is why I love reviewing what is on the screen as much as what is on the page. (Visit my website www.unhealedwound.com for my movie and television reviews.)
I have been intoxicated for years by family sagas. I am spellbound by the magical conversations of friends talking about their families' secrets. These stories percolate inside my brain for family stories are the foundation of some of our most memorable dramas.
Buddhist meditation has always been a part of my writing process as well. Meditation unlocks my writing. What is real in my emotional life--my memories, my images as a Zen practitioner—comes to life on the page.
Author’s Note
Everyone has a story to tell.
The original title for my novel was Unhealed Wound. For Buddhists, there is no wound that cannot heal. However, in order to heal, we must meet the challenge, face the shadows, and learn.
Things Unsaid, the title my publisher selected, emphasizes secrets and lies, what each member of a family cannot or will not say to each other. Every child may think she knows everything about her parents, but that’s an illusion, a fiction. A child only gets a sliver. It took three years of writing about those slivers to complete Things Unsaid.
The emotional truth in Things Unsaid has scenes adapted from my own family and from friends who have shared moments of their family’s lives with me. My imagination kicked in to describe the personal: from parent to child to becoming a parent oneself. When family and friends know you have written a novel, they try to see themselves in the narrative. Ironically, the scenes they identify are often ones I completely imagined.
Families are not chosen and to that extent, because they seem impossible to escape from, they make wonderful resource material for novelists. I hope the reader will understand the complex layers embedded in secrets and lies. To what degree are we shaped by our childhood? By the secrets? Can we redirect the influences from our past.
Readers, see and feel what family means through your own experience and the experience of others you know.