Home! Retour! Vuelta!

AMANDA MARQUIT 19-year-old Manhattanite who doesn't hold back!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looking like a young Courtney Love, Amanda Marquit might still end up a rocker.  She was a child ballet star (at 8, she won a role in the New York City Ballet's "The Nutcracker"), and is rumored to be accomplished on both the piano and electric guitar.  But what has people talking about the 19 year old with the heavily made up eyes, bleached blonde hair, and belly-button piercing these days is that she spent ages 14 through 16 writing her first novel, a gritty fiction published with St. Martin's Press called Shut the Door. The novel debuted January 2005, as Amanda was preparing to take her last midterms as a high school student at New York City's Professional Children's School and waiting to hear back from Brown University, which she would start attending in the fall. But the story began when Amanda began to write at a summer camp when she was 14. Miserable and lonely, and having just read Nabokov's Lolita, Amanda was "completely stunned at its beauty and power." She was close to Lolita's age when she read the book, and thought it was "weird... disturbing... It was a huge inspiration to me."

The first words readers see by Amanda are "To Mom, Dad, and Adam, for being the family upon which this book is based - just kidding." Many in the media, however, still wonder on first inspection if Amanda's family really is the model of Shut the Door's dysfunctional family. A quick look into Amanda's life, and anyone can see that this is not so. In the same vein as "American Beauty", Shut the Door is a tale of two teen sisters, Lilliana (16) and Vivian (17) sometimes literally carving out their place in life by taking huge risks, while their parents Beatrice and Harry have their marraige fall apart around them. The dysfunctional suburban family alternately deals with promiscuity, alcohol, drug abuse, self-mutilation, anorexia, lesbianism, voyeurism, and infedelity with a prostitute. Born in 1987 to Richard and  Stacy Marquit, a fund manager and bond trader respectively, Amanda, along with her brother Adam who is two years her junior and hopes to play baseball for the New York Yankees, lives in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where there's a baby grand piano and modern art all over the walls. In her room, Amanda has posters of Iggy Pop and bookshelves filled with the likes of Nabokov and Oscar Wilde, some of her literary heroes. Though her agent is talking with people in Hollywood about Shut the Door, Amanda's top priority right now is college. If noveling doesn't work out? Amanda hopes to become a music journalist.

Amanda's father showed the book to a family friend who represented non-fiction. The agent liked the book so much, he offered to represent it himself! Publisher's Weekly compared Amanda to Joyce Carol Oates, calling Marquit's "dark subject matter" a "youthful feat.” As of 2006, Shut the Door has sold over 30,000 copies! Did you know?: Although Amanda has plans for a second novel already, she isn't under contract with St. Martin's yet to write anything else.

Chat in Amanda's forum, click here!

BOOKS BY: AMANDA (click title go to Amazon.com!)

Shut the Door

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <<----Previous ---- Next---->> Are you a young author? Want to see a page of your own here? Contact B. at youngadultwriters@yahoo.com