Brenda Webster is an American writer, critic and translator. She is the author of five novels, including The Beheading Game (2006) and Vienna Triangle (2009), which appeared on bestseller lists in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times . [1] Her most recent novel, After Auschwitz: A Love Story , published in 2013, is a story of an elderly man dealing with the early stages of dementia as he struggles to hold on to his memories and cope with his changing relationship to his wife. [2]
Webster is the current president of PEN West . [3]
Brenda Webster was born in New York City in 1936, the daughter of abstract expressionist painter Ethel Schwabacher and the prominent entertainment lawyer Wolf Schwabacher . Webster's memoir The Last Good Freudian recounts a privileged childhood that was deeply affected by her family's devotion to Freudian ideology. Webster herself entered psychoanalysis at age 14, but eventually rebelled against what she saw as the patriarchy of orthodox Freudianism . [4]