The All of It
by Jeannette Haien
List Price: $11.00
Pages: 160
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060971479
Publisher: HarperCollins
After more than thirty-five years as a professional concert pianist and
music teacher, Jeannette Haien, in her 60s, began her second career as
a novelist. Her first novel, The All of It, published in 1986,
garnered the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts
and Letters. Haien then took eight years to finish her second novel, Matters
of Chance, published in 1997. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to a Dutch immigrant-industrialist
father and a violinist mother, she received a bachelor's degree in English
and a masters degree in Music from the University of Michigan. Even before
Haien graduated, she was already winning renown as a professional pianist
and teacher. It was through her understanding of the structure of classical
music that she learned how to create her classically constructed stories.
According to Haien, "the structure of a work is the essence of it.
It's discipline, if you will, which makes great freedom possible. Under
the laws of structure, you have the freedom to work in the freest way
imaginable." Writing five to eight hours a day, she marries rigor
to a highly developed sense of expectation. Says Haien, "my life
has been nothing but a dawning exercise every day of expectation. I have
been continuously so surprised, that I am childlike to the point of glee
sometimes." Haien and her husband have a daughter and grandson and
live in New York City and Connemara, Ireland.
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