Spotlights and Shadows

About the author

Mila Lewis writes literary fiction about the machinery of fame — what it costs to be desired by strangers, and what it does to the people caught in its orbit. Before fiction, she spent years as a technical writer for software companies, learning to say difficult things plainly and trust the reader to keep up. That training shows in her prose: precise, unadorned, with space between the lines for the reader to breathe. She grew up in Southern California, studied in Paris, and now lives in France — which may explain why her novels move between cultures as easily as her characters do. Her literary debts are to Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Marguerite Duras — writers who understood that the most violent things happen quietly, in drawing rooms and kitchens and the spaces between words.