Anastasia Zadeik never imagined she would become one of the authors she has come to admire, but writing is something she has always done, beginning in a puffy, pink vinyl diary with a key at the age of six. “I stored the minutiae of my life, poems or lyrics that moved me, tirades against myself and existential musings. For me, journaling was a way of processing my life,” says Anastasia.
The author grew up in a close-knit family with four siblings. Her mother was a preschool educator and her father a Lutheran minister who spent nearly every Sunday morning as a guest pastor all around Chicago. “My mother, siblings, and I would often accompany him,” she says, “staying after the morning services for potlucks, where we met people from all walks of life and came to appreciate Jell-o molds with marshmallows and green bean casseroles made with Campbells Soup and crispy onions.”
Reading and storytelling played a huge part in Anastasia’s young life, including tall tales from a grandfather who claimed he made his entry into the United States by diving off of a freighter with his shoes tied to his head and a bowie knife between his teeth. “Which my siblings and I did not learn was untrue until we were well into our forties.”
“Though my parents may not have intended to turn us into storytellers like my grandfather, we were each given three minutes to share the most important or interesting thing that happened to us that day every night at dinner,” she recalls. “Only when I began writing stories myself did I realize I learned how to structure a short story and maintain my audience’s interest around my childhood kitchen table. I may have also learned a thing or two about the beauty of elaboration, or as my grandfather would have said, ‘making the story more interesting for the listener.’”
Anastasia graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1985. She thought she wanted to be a lawyer, but after working for a law firm for a year, she decided it was not her path. It was, however, where she met her future husband. She ended up getting a job with an entrepreneurial PhD who was starting a memory research firm. “How lucky I was. For nearly a decade, I worked in the field of international neuropsychological research focused on memory disorders.” It was a career, she says, that helped her cope when her mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
In the late 1980s, experiencing empty nest syndrome, Anastasia took a writing class with Marni Freedman, who encouraged her to write a memoir or a novel. She began a memoir about being a mother to two children while losing a mother and dealing with a drug-addicted stepdaughter. “But after writing about a third of the book, I realized I was still living in the story and needed some space from it in order to write it with any balance or nuance, instead of just frustration and rage.”
So she began working on what would become the award-winning novel, Blurred Fates. “I came up with my main character, Kate. I could see her, the woman behind me at Starbucks, or the one driving erratically in the pickup line at school, or the one sitting alone on the sidelines of the soccer game. And I gave her a triggering conflict and let it unfold.”
Winning the Sarton Award, Anastasia says, has given her a much-needed boost of confidence. “In the past, I convinced myself that everyone in critique groups who loved my work was saying so just to be nice.” With added confidence, Anastasia continued writing, and her second book, The Other Side of Nothing, is planned for a May 2024 release.
