J.J. Amies
AUTHOR

J.J. Amies

Literature & Fiction
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J.J. Amies is a pen name, adopted by a pair of close woman friends (amies) who were told that co-authored novels never worked. We had written a novel together, The Larcher, a fictionalized account of our childhood as ten-year-old best friends in a small mining and fishing village on the coast of Northumberland in the 1950s. The description of that process of collaboration, across the Atlantic and across fifty eight years of separation, can be found on our web site, www.thelarcherwordpress.com. There it is revealed that one of us, the one presenting the child Anne’s perspective in The Larcher, is an academic who studies child language and cognitive development. Jill de Villiers is a Professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, and has written several books and numerous articles about language acquisition in children. Her more recent research has been about how acquiring complex grammar can alter the understanding a child has of the world, especially their capacity to understand others’ beliefs when these beliefs are false. The central story in The Larcher is about a false belief, occasioned by a mistake in interpretation of a word that the child learns. Jill left England after being an undergraduate there, to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1974. After publishing The Larcher in 2017, Jill was musing on the still-unwritten stories in her mind. Prompted by her collaborator Jean, Jill decided that the child in The Larcher could grow up to be a Professor, and hence A Hundred Stones was born. In A Hundred Stones, Anne is a Cognitive Science Professor, living an alternative life to Jill, as if she continued her academic career in England close to home. The chapters are structured around the topics in a course that Jill has taught for many years, on Philosophy of Psychology, but for complicated narrative reasons, the fictional action takes place in the 1980s. Jill’s ambition was to emulate the kind of academic novel that has amused her for years. The genre has been dominated by male writers, of whom the funniest was Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim). But for a modern woman to read Lucky Jim now is quite a painful experience. A Hundred Stones became a humorous novel about the academic life of a woman professor in Britain in the 1980s. In a strange twist, the choice of the pen name - J.J. Amies – becomes a sly comment on the genre.
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