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Suze Leonie

Suze Leonie writes fiction where the body is not a metaphor but a witness. Her work stays close to physical reality, with breath that shortens, panic that tightens the chest, and fatigue that slows the limbs. She shows emotion through sensation, posture, appetite, and the practical choices a body forces in real time. Psychology, in her pages, does not hover above the skin. It lives in the throat, lungs, stomach, and nervous system, where dignity is measured in what the body must endure and what it refuses to hide.

Alongside this body realism, Leonie brings a distinctive theatrical intelligence to the page. She is attuned to how everyday life is quietly staged, how people are cast into roles, coached into acceptable emotions, and expected to perform composure, gratitude, or normality on cue. Power often operates like direction, deciding who may speak, which feelings are permitted, and what must be edited out. Her chapters can read like scenes, with dialogue shaped by audience pressure that is felt even in private rooms.

Across novels including Ivan, Boris and Me and Yonah and Devorah’s Traveling Music Theater, Leonie traces the friction between performance and truth. The world demands a script, and the body interrupts. When the staged self collapses, her fiction follows what breaks, what becomes newly speakable, and how autonomy begins with being believed about one’s own body.