Love Queen : The Making of a Master, the first in my memoir series. It’s a revealing look into my life from age 28 to 38, which included travel, love, marriage, divorce, dating, breast cancer, running my online coaching business and losing myself in personal development. With what I learned along the way to be healthy and happy in life and love, shared through (sometimes very funny) stories and my actual journal entries.
And Wonderlust : A Philosophical Romance about Creative Women, a novel set in Lucerne, Switzerland. I started to write it when I was 29 and had just moved there to be with my love. The main character, Sarah, is a 26 year-old travel agent from Perth, Australia, who believes in perfection but discovers that life is to be lived in the imperfection
Mireille Parker (1979 – present) is an Indian Australian author from Fremantle, West Australia, who has devoted herself to writing for the past 15 years. Journaling since age eleven, Mireille wanted to be a writer since discovering Anais Nin in the film Henry and June on daytime TV while at uni, aged 20.
She graduated from The University of West Australia, majoring in English literature and psychology, with a history minor (The Vikings and Ancient Greeks). But it was during a stay in Mumbai in 2003, while recording Hindi vinyl in a sound studio, that a book just started coming out of her. At age 28, she went to Murdoch university to study the craft of creative writing and has been practising ever since.
Wonderlust, a novel about a travel agent from Perth who goes to Lucerne, Switzerland, on a cultural adventure and finds love in a creative life was her first published book. Mireille was an English as a Second Language teacher for 18 years and a life coach for two, but quit both due to metastatic breast cancer and brain surgery.
Mireille’s passions are many. She has been a hip hop dancer in New York, a Bollywood dancer in Switzerland, and sold donuts on the beach in Montpellier, France**. Writing, however, is the love of her life. Love Queen : The Making of a Master is the first in a series of at least five books.
** The passion being French. Although I am quite passionate about donuts too, especially when there’s a road trip and black coffee involved.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and I’ve read all his novels. The Great Gatsby. The Jazz Age. Tender Is The Night. The Beautiful and The Damned. I love feeling that 1920s East Coast US Jazz Age vibe. And I’m equally as intrigued by Zelda, his wife. If you’ve seen Midnight In Paris you know.
I do love Haruki Murakami too and my style of writing is more like his. I loved his books Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, where he compares writing to marathon running. I learned so much about discipline and having a simple routine from this book.
Of course I loved Seinfeld and first came across Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer there. After discovering Anais Nin, I was reminded to read it and finally did. Early 1930s Paris would be my chosen destination, when artists, writers, contortionists, prostitutes and madams drank wine and celebrated together.
But I’m so happy in the present age and Wonderlust was inspired by Tropic of Cancer‘s walking and talking around a city, except it’s 2007 Lucerne. And yes I love Catcher In The Rye too. I read it in 2002 when I had travelled from my ex-boyfriend’s place in Lyon to Paris. I was supposed to be getting an au pair visa, but instead my every move was narrated in Holden Caulfield’s drawl and I ended up moving to London to be with my friends instead.
Likewise, I loved Eat, Pray, Love. Another of my favourites is Candy by Mian Mian, written and set in Shenzen and Shanghai in the 90s. I picked it up at Heathrow airport and read it late into the jet-lagged nights, when I was wondering what the hell I was doing back in Perth.
I used to be one of those grass is greener people, always wanting to be elsewhere, until I healed the split mind. This is what Love Queen is about.
As I was writing it, I read Charles Bukowski’s Women (I love his style too) and felt my memoir was a present-day response to his 1970s LA, with less alcohol and more insight. Men.
I love how good writing helps us to experience the world more deeply and there are so many books I love. I’m sharing more on Instagram, but all-time favourites include Night Letters (set in Venice) and Corfu by Robert Desaix , The Devil and Maria Davalos by Victoria Hammond, set in 16th century Naples, The Virgin Suicides, Lolita and Nin’s collections of erotic short-stories, Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
I’ve been into the power of the mind and manifesting since that trip to India when I was 24. But it was a breakup that led me to discover this. My mind was going round and round with repetitive thinking and I just wanted it to stop! Peace. I just wanted peace.
At 35 I became a coach and I used to run workshops and a program called Healthy and Powerfully Feminine. After brain surgery I got into the law of attraction majorly and delved deeper into quantum manifesting as life through me more challenges. When I discovered I’m a Projector in Human Design (3/6 Splenic) in 2019, this all made a lot of sense.
And I write about my experience and discoveries of all this in Love Queen.
Email hello@mireilleparker.com for any queries.
With so much love,
Mireille xx
"The most important kind of freedom is to be who you truly are."
- Jim Morrison