Great Expectations

So yesterday, I got Pip to come into work an hour early so that I could race up to Auckland and meet one of my favourite authors - Paullina Simons.
Now, you know how sometimes there is someone you greatly admire, and then you meet them in real life or see them on tv and they are not at all what you had imagined and you get really disappointed? (That's how I felt when I saw Sarah Brightman give an interview on Greame Norton). Well, I am pleased to report that Paullina exceeded my expectations. She is absolutely lovely. Stunning, as you expect from a Russian woman and extremely witty. I was disappointed she didn't speak for longer - unlike the librarian who introduced her. Now she should stick to shelving books!
She was at the Takapuna Library as part of her NZ / Aus tour to promote her latest novel Road To Paradise (which I am currently reading). But of course she could not get away from talking about The Bronze Horseman, which is of course mine and most of her readers' personal favourite - And which I will now only lend to extremely careful people, as she signed my copy - yay! Anyway, I was intrigued to learn that the communal apartment on the 5th Soviet where Tatiana and her family live was actually Paullina's family home, where she lived until her family moved to the USA when she was 10!
She had some great stories to tell about how her stories came about, and of her very first novel written when she was 12 about a woman who is pregnant for five years because she can't get over the grief of her lover dying in war! Unfortunately, her mother threw it out. So please, please, parents, do not throw out you children's writing, pictures, sculptures etc!
So, am still very excited that I got the chance to meet her, and now I'm off to get absorbed in Road To Paradise!