Escaping with Laurie Viera Rigler...plus a book giveaway

**Giveaway is now closed**

Laurie Viera Rigler is the author of the time-swapping novels "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict" and "Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict," which are available in North America (Plume), the UK (Bloomsbury), and Italy (Sperling & Kupfer). Her short story, "Intolerable Stupidity," will appear in the upcoming anthology of Austen-inspired fiction entitled "Jane Austen Made Me Do It" (Ballantine). She can be found at her online home, janeaustenaddict.com, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.
She's here today to talk about the therapeutic benefits of a good book and has two personally inscribed copies of "Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict" to give to some lucky readers anywhere in the world.

Fiction Therapy

No one opens a novel expecting it to solve their problems. But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who opens a novel to escape from problems.

For me, reading has always been a refuge. When I was a kid, I learned to tune out family squabbles by immersing myself in a book. Sort of a kid's version of noise-cancelling headphones. I'd open a book, and everything outside would disappear.

My life today is far more serene, but I still turn to novels for escape. The more transportive the fiction, the better. It's no wonder I wrote two novels in which my heroines long so much for escape that they not only find themselves transported to another time, but also into another body.

In one of those novels, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, my privileged heroine (also named Jane) from Regency England finds herself stuck in the body and life of Courtney, a twenty-first-century L.A. girl with a very small apartment and a colossal disaster of a love life. Unable to crack the code of all those self-help dating books crammed into Courtney's bookshelves (what is a girl from 1813 to make of terms like "hooking up" and "commitment quotient" anyway?), Jane turns to the works of Jane Austen for comfort. They made sense in her own time; perhaps they can shed light on our contemporary world as well. And let's face it: the labyrinthine rules of 21st-century courtship are probably almost as confusing to us as they would be to a girl from Regency England.

The words of Jane Austen are as relevant to me as they are to my nineteenth-century heroine. I think of her as my wise counselor, my oasis from all my worries, and my gatekeeper to another world. It's funny how her novels, while offering me an escape from things I don't want to think about, actually end up being a safe way to deal with the very things I wished to avoid. She's such a keen observer of human nature—the good, the bad, and the ridiculous—and she's such an enchanting storyteller, that before I know it I'm recognizing situations from my own life in her stories. And she's so funny that even if what I recognize about myself isn't all that attractive, I can laugh at it all and not take it so seriously.

Special thanks to Laurie for sharing her thoughts with us and her books with you.

How to win "Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict":

Please comment below with your e-mail address.
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Bonus entries (can be listed all in one post):
1. Please tell us: Do you have a favorite novel or novels that you turn to when you need an escape from your own worries?

2. Please tell us: Have you ever found an insight into your own life in your favorite fiction?
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Giveaway ends August 14th at midnight EST.