Michael Zadoorian
Michael Zadoorian is the author of five works of fiction. His second novel, The Leisure Seeker was recently made into a feature film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland.
His most recent novel is The Narcissism of Small Differences. Set in bottomed-out 2009 Detroit, it’s the story of Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek, an unmarried Gen X couple with no kids or mortgage, as Midwestern parents seem to require. Now on the cusp of forty, both work at jobs that they’re not sure they believe in anymore, yet with varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering—both caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development. The Narcissism of Small Differences tells of an aging creative class, doomed to ask the questions: Is it possible to outgrow irony? Does not having children make you one? Is there even such a thing as selling out anymore? By turns wry and ribald, kitschy and gritty, poignant and thoughtful, The Narcissism of Small Differences is the story of Joe and Ana’s life together, their relationship, their tribes, their work, and their comic quest for a life that is their own and no one else’s.
His third novel was Beautiful Music. Set in 1970’s era Detroit, Beautiful Music is about one young man’s transformation through music. Danny Yzemski is a husky, pop radio–loving loner balancing a dysfunctional home life with the sudden harsh realities of freshman year at a high school marked by racial turbulence. When tragedy strikes the family, Danny’s mother becomes increasingly erratic and angry about the seismic cultural shifts unfolding in her city and the world. As she tries to keep it together with the help of Librium, highballs, and breakfast cereal, Danny finds his own reason to carry on: rock ‘n’ roll. Beautiful Music is a funny and poignant story about the power of music and its ability to save one’s soul.
Zadoorian’s second novel, The Leisure Seeker was an international bestseller and translated into over 20 different languages worldwide. John and Ella, two eighty-somethings, decide to kidnap themselves from the doctors and grown children who run their lives for a final adventure in their ancient Winnebago. In a starred review, Booklist wrote "The Leisure Seeker is pretty much like life itself: joyous, painful, moving, tragic, mysterious, and not to be missed." The L.A. Times said: Zadoorian is true to these geezers. He draws them in their most honest light. I hoped for a book that would make me laugh during these tight times, and I was rewarded." And the Sydney Morning Herald stated: "This is a sad, sweet love letter to a fading America… sharp humour about aging and a quietly shocking ending.”
Michael Zadoorian's first novel, Second Hand is about love and loss for a Detroit-area junk store owner. The New York Times Book Review said “Second Hand may be a gift from the (Tiki) gods” and called it "a romantic adventure that explores what Yeats called 'the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.'" Selected for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program, Second Hand also received the Great Lakes Colleges Association prestigious New Writers Award. Translated into Italian, Portuguese and French, it's still a cult favorite.
His short story collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit follows characters coming to terms with the past and the present in a broken city. Lansing Journal called them "…stories that grab you, shake you and slap you upside the head." The Ann Arbor Observer called the stories “sometimes wildly funny and more than a little crazy, yet they have a heart-breaking affection for the battered lives they portray."
Zadoorian is a recipient of a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts, the Columbia University Anahid Literary Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the GLIBA Great Lakes Great Reads award, and two Michigan Notable Book Awards. He lives in the Detroit area.
“The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week , a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather ---all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren't”
“You worry about your parents, siblings, spouses dying, yet no one prepares you for your friends dying. Every time you flip through your address book, you are reminded of it---she's gone, he's gone, they're both gone. Names and numbers and addresses scratched out. Page after page of gone, gone, gone. The sense of loss that you feel isn't just for the person. It is the death of your youth, the death of fun, of warm conversations and too many drinks, of long weekends, of shared pains and victories and jealousies, of secrets that you couldn't tell anyone else, of memories that only you two shared.”
“But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life”
“Why does the world have to destroy anything that doesn't fit in? We still can't figure out that this is the most important reason to love something.”
“Anyone who never met a man he didn't like just isn't trying hard enough.”
“You spend your life so worried about what others think, when in reality, people mostly don't think. On the few occasions when they do, true, it is often something bad, but one has to at least admire the fact that they're thinking at all.”