Meet Nadine
Ask Nadine what she writes about and she’ll probably say “fiction… about women”.
Upon closer inspection you might notice that what Nadine actually writes about is people, mostly women, living, loving, working, and fighting in a world where a million different nationalities, ethnic origins, races and languages intersect and interconnect, slamming into each other every single second of every day.
In other words, Nadine writes about what it’s like to live in color. Or a million different colors, which is not all that surprising given Nadine’s, um, colorful life.
Nadine was born in Beirut, Lebanon (she’s not saying when, but suffice to say it was some time after the city’s fall from glittering, Paris-of-the East status and well into the country’s devastating civil war). As the daughter of Palestinian refugees she got to experience the joys of international travel without, you know, a passport, as these were the days when Palestinians were still being referred to as “stateless”. To make matters even more complicated for future boyfriends, well-meaning acquaintances and census bureau interviewers, Nadine’s father moved the family to the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the country’s Roaring Oil Boom 80s, where she was teased relentlessly for her Euro-sounding first name. For the next nine years the family would shuttle between the arid, forbidding culture and landscape of the Saudi desert and live-every-minute-as-though-it-were-your-last (because it really could be), Lebanon.
When a decade had elapsed without the war showing any signs of abating, Nadine’s family, along with many other sensible Arabs, made the difficult decision to Go West. (Why her parents settled on the très français Montreal when no one in the family could speak French is beyond her… though she was finally grateful for her first name)
Nadine grew up loving all things right-brained – fine arts, fashion, sketching, reading, writing. So, naturally, when it came time to pick a college major, she went with… accounting. Sucked into the rat race before she even graduated (whoever came up with the idea of summer internships doing office work should be taken out to a field and beaten senseless with a bat, Goodfellas style), she was living for nights out clubbing with the girls and shoe shopping (or any kind of shopping, really).
One Certified Management Accountant designation and six months of soul-sucking office drudgery later, she took her first trip to Varadero, Cuba. The week-long jaunt would reignite a long-dormant love of travel and rekindle memories of the joie-de-vivre-in-the-face-of-difficulty attitude of her native Lebanon, of simpler times when summers were meant for ogling hot guys all day, not beefing up your resume.
Utterly mesmerized but fairly realistic about the whole throwing-caution-to-the-wind-and-moving-to-Cuba idea,
Nadine managed to reconcile her analytical, no-nonsense inclinations with her Havana daydreaming with a little bit of creative thinking… In 2002 she moved to the Cayman Islands to work in offshore banking.
With the closest shopping mall sitting across the sea in Miami, Nadine was sadly bereft of her chief distraction. So she decided to pursue her two life-long dreams – writing and fashion. In 2003 she got to work on Fashionably Late, a coming-0f-age story recalling her first life-changing trip to the Caribbean. She also signed up for a fashion marketing degree at LaSalle College where her first assignment was to come up with a line of handbags. She nearly wept with joy.
Nadine continued to work, study, and write, and in June 2006, saw Fashionably Late hit the shelves. She has since published several travel articles featuring Caribbean destinations. After a brief stint in the Montreal fashion world, Nadine returned to the Cayman Islands to work, live, and write some more. Her second novel, Cutting Loose, is an October 2008 Forge Books release.
