Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest, Erika Rummel, author of Evita and Me.

Award winning author, Erika Rummel is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction books and seven novels. Her seventh novel, Evita and Me was published on May 24, 2022.

She won the Random House Creative Writing Award (2011) for a chapter from The Effects of Isolation on the Brain and The Colorado Independent Publishers’ Association’ Award for Best Historical Novel, in 2018.

She is the recipient of a Getty Fellowship and the Killam Award.

Erika grew up in Vienna, emigrated to Canada and obtained a PhD from the University of Toronto. She taught at Wilfrid Laurier and U of Toronto.  

She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has lived in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Bee: Please tell us something about Evita and Me that is not in the summary. (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)

Erika: I made two of my characters Canadian. This fictional connection between Toronto and Buenos Aires is a nod to my own, real connection with the city.

I lived in Argentina for five years, but I know Buenos Aires only as it is now. I loved reading up on its glamour days in the 40s. Wish I could have known it then!    

Bee: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters?  Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?

Erika: Pierre is based on Pierre Daye, a Belgian journalist and travel writer. I read his unpublished memoir in the Hoover Library at Stanford. He was a slippery fellow.

Like the character in my novel, he fled Brussels during the war and emigrated to Buenos Aires. In the novel I changed more than his name. I gave him a new personality: still cagey about his past, but a man of character.

Bee: How completely do you develop your characters before beginning to write?

Erika: I don’t believe in elaborate outlines. The characters take shape as I write, and they change with the (numerous) rewrites.

The only character I had solidly pegged from the start was Evita’s brother, Juan Duarte. Reading up on him, I saw Duarte as a thug and brutal exploiter of women, a forerunner of Harvey Weinstein.

In my novel, Duarte gets what he deserves – without trial!  

Bee: Why did Evita share her secret about her jewels with Mona?  Does she have an ulterior motive trusting a teenager with this information? 

Erika: She sees her younger self in Mona. Like her, Mona came from a questionable background, got no respect, and was up against the establishment. And like Evita, Mona is intelligent, capable, and ambitious.

Evita has an ulterior motive as well -- she sees Mona as a potential partner for her brother, someone to keep him in check and out of trouble. She is wrong! 

Bee: Which actress’s would you like to see playing Evita and Mona, if Evita and Me were to become a movie or mini series?

Erika: Mia Kunis as Evita and Elle Fanning as Mona.

Bee: Where did you get the inspiration for your cover?

Erika: It is based on Evita as depicted on an Argentinian stamp. The colourful treatment is inspired by Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster of Obama.

Bee: How much time and effort went into your research for Evita and Me?

Erika: I am a professional historian and do a considerable amount of research for my historical novels. There is plenty of material available on Evita.

It took some digging, however, to find the coroner’s report on Duarte’s death and the text of his so-called suicide note. Most people believe that he was murdered.

My novel tells you how! As mentioned earlier, I read the typescript of Daye’s memoir, but in the process of writing my novel, I recreated him. The real Daye ended up leading a quiet life, teaching literature at the University of Buenos Aires. My character leads a dramatic life as Evita’s bodyguard.

Bee: You write both non-fiction and historical fiction.  Have you ever fictionalized one of your non-fiction books or have you considered it?

Erika: In 2017 I published an English translation of the correspondence between Alfred Nobel and his Viennese mistress (A Nobel Affair).

The following year I turned that material into a mystery/crime story: Three Women and Alfred Nobel.

I also published a scholarly biography of the Spanish Inquisitor Jimenez de Cisneros and used it as a take-off for my award-winning novel, The Inquisitor’s Niece.

Bee: When did you first have a desire to write?  How did this desire manifest itself?

Erika: I published a few short stories in the 80s, then got bogged down teaching and advancing my academic career.

For some years I published only non-fiction, but that’s not where I wanted to go. I took early retirement and started writing novels.

I’ve found my vocation!

Bee: What book/s are you reading at present? 

Erika: Abigail Adams (a biography of President John Adams’ wife) by Woody Holton – it might lead to another historical novel.

Bee: What are you currently working on?

Erika: A very different kind of project: a course on memoir writing, which I’ve been asked to teach in September.

Bee: Thanks again Erika and good luck with Evita and Me and your future endeavors.

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