ES: Tennessee Williams once said, “There is something about a hotel room that is both lonely and sensual.” What is your own experience of hotel rooms?

AM: My dream was always to live in a hotel. Τhe hotel room is a highly charged internal landscape, it brings to the surface qualities and emotions I didn’t know I had. It has to do with appropriation, liberation and exploration – almost like washing my eyes clean. If you look at the world from a different room, like here from the penthouse, you acquire new eyes.

So, the question becomes: what if I lived here? What would my life be like? Would these people on the opposite balcony still be there? Or are they tourists and will leave tomorrow? Those tall trees on the street, the jacarandas… they bloom in spring, they stay still and they’ve seen everything. So, what do they see, rooted, while everything around them moves? 

ES: Did you first encounter hotels through literature? 

AM: I did. Especially in 19th-century novels. Henry James, for instance, his “Ambassadors”. Those characters move between hotel rooms and aristocratic houses. I remember how much I cherished this feeling of innocence, of life reinvented. Same with Jean Rhys whom I admire fondly. Her women protagonists live in strange hotel rooms in Europe.

Later, as a young journalist, I had this kind of life – staying at hotels while invited to write something about a city, a conference, a cultural event. I remember how liberating it felt. Also, in a way, to live outside my social class. I wasn’t rich, but I knew how to enjoy the good life. My fantasy grew from there. I would imagine staying in these places, inhabiting them, inviting friends.

And then when I read about Nabokov, who lived in a hotel in Switzerland, how he wrote his books standing up like a conductor, I imagined myself as a Nabokova – walking by the lake, chasing butterflies and returning home to conduct a concert of words.

ES: It’s interesting that the design has resonated with you this way, because that philosophy is really at the core of all HOS spaces. The process has very little to do with buying new, and much more to do with working with the materials already present in the building and reimagining them creatively. I was also struck by what you said about wanting to engage with your writing in a similar way — as a kind of deconstruction.

AM: Exactly, to reconstruct the deconstructed. For instance, the book I’m writing about Athens takes the form of a tourist guide, but it shouldn’t be a proper one. It should be written as a novel. 

ES: Tell me more about the process of writing a novel as a city guide.

AM: For this assignment from “L’arbre qui marche” I’m completely free to invent the story, but it has to have a utilitarian approach, because the reader, most probably a tourist, still needs to see what I’m referring to in contemporary Athens—the places, the walks, the monuments.

So I decided to rewrite Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but set the entire plot in Athens, reinventing the characters and the relations and the itineraries. 

Hybridity again. I take a work of modernism that speaks to me and I try to place it in Athens and see what works and what doesn’t. How can you have this dance of internal monologues of different people, as in Mrs. Dalloway, getting in and out of their minds as they are walking in Psyrri, or Kypseli, or Syntagma Square? And how can you move from one mind to the next and create a chorus of perceptions, of consciousness? Like a choir. That is my ambition.

“This is my way of thinking about literature too—how to play with material, how to have these layers of writing playfully. I love to see that around me in different manifestations.”

ES: And you work in situ for this project?

AM: I always like to work in situ, to live my protagonists life. For this one, I asked friends if I could stay in their flats and I also did a residency at the hotels. There was a specific purpose: one of the characters is German and comes from abroad, but through his love for my Miss Dalloway (who is Greek and called Ms. Delloglou), he becomes Greek in his mind. So I had to decide where he would stay if he returned after a long time. I couldn’t decide between Shila and Mona, so I experienced both—but I knew from the beginning that he would end up at Mona…

ES: The way you speak about the characters is as if you treat them as real. Do you think about them more during or after the novel is written?

AM: It’s like a very intense love affair. Once they are there and I write about them, I am constantly with them, and I also try to find their analogues in life. I see their nose in a sculpture, their hair in a painting. Afterwards, I place them somewhere in my mind – quite compartmentalized, but as something to be treasured.

ES: How do you start getting into the shoes of a character?

AM: With the German character, for example, I spoke to Germans who had been to Greece, to understand what impressed or unsettled them first. I like to start from a real point of view, a grounding point. Like in yoga: feet on the floor, then the head can go everywhere. 

I believe writing happens with both the heart and the mind. I try to invent characters in the sense of real mentalities – people we can identify with. Because we all carry everything inside us; all nationalities, all tendencies and feelings. We are very brave, but very much afraid too. We are good and bad; jealous and generous.

So, I take these “soul landscapes” and give a character a dominant tendency in order to understand it more clearly. Vulnerability, for instance. Why does this vulnerable protagonist sometimes becomes so harsh and introspective? Precisely because they are vulnerable.

And when all this enters a plot – people walking and meeting and celebrating; alone in their bed and crying, or out in the rain afraid it might dissolve them—all this is, I think, what novels can still do. They give you a world to live in, which is wider than your own solipsistic one.

“We all carry everything inside us; all nationalities, all tendencies. We are very brave, but very much afraid too. We are good and bad; jealous and generous.”

ES: And to give you the tools to describe worlds that you may have felt but not quite know how to express them, right?

AM: Exactly. You become an actor. There is this playful sense of role-playing.

ES: Given the premise of the book-guide, you are, in a way, role-playing as someone who lives in the center. 

AM: Well, when I was a child, we lived in Exarchia until I was twelve. Then, like many families in the ’80s, we moved to the suburbs. People had some land and they wanted to escape the suffocating Athens of the time, that unbearable air we called “nefos”.

These are the families that are now trying to return to the center –  because of the metro, because of the changing city. They are re-evaluating what they had and what they missed. Of course, they had their gardens, with flowers and trees like Miss Dalloway. But there is something in the life of a city that nothing compares to.

And just to return to modernism—this is what it taught us, through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. That walking in the city is such a transcendental experience, as your consciousness moves and mixes to that of others.

ES: How does Athens feel to you in its current modern state? 

AM: What I see is interesting and strange, as in every experience. For instance, from the terrace I can tell which places are Airbnbs – plastic chairs, vegetation that is not Greek but tropical. This is sad and melancholic to me, because it’s nice to feel that the city is inhabited by real residents, not only by people who come and go.

But then there are also things that remain beautifully unchanged. Yesterday, for instance, I was at the Central Food Market and ate at Ta Biftekakia, which is exactly as it was twenty years ago. In Psyrri there’s a man who sells bamboo baskets. He told me that his great-grandfather had been left at the church opposite, before the war, and a family took him along with their other children. And that is how he came to open this place.

And this felt like pure history. An Athenian life, the way I experienced it as a child in Exarchia. It is still there. It only asks that you open yourself to people and their life stories. Stories are there, waiting for you.

“Walking in the city is such a transcendental experience. Because your consciousness moves to that of others.”

ES: Considering that you chose a male pen name, did being a woman writer at the time carry a sense of risk?

AM: Absolutely. Also because I come from a generation where being a woman writer was an extravagance, almost a sin. I had to pretend I was a man, with male interests. I had to be liked by male writers, because only then would you be considered worthy. 

ES: So they would support you – speak well of you, promote you within their circles?

AM: Exactly. In the same way that in surrealism, for instance, women who were very serious artists—and we know about them now—were considered muses. Dora Maar, for example. I discovered her seven years ago.

ES: That she had an identity as an artist in her own right, beyond being seen as “a man’s muse.”

AM: Yes. For the generation of my daughter, most of this information is available. They can see and decide how feminist they want to be, what they want to write about. For us, it was hidden information. You couldn’t fully embrace your identity as a woman artist. You had to act like a man, to adopt their perspective, sometimes their misogyny. And also if you spoke about the body of a woman, the feelings of a woman, your work was not considered important.

Take, for example, how much we knew about the coming of age of a man through literature – even about their masturbation. We knew everything from Philip Roth and all these writers. But we didn’t know how a girl discovers her body. And in the 90s it felt awkward to write about it.

But now it is happening. There is a whole generation of women, especially in Latin American literature, who speak about the female body. 

ES: I think of Anaïs Nin when I read her short stories. The fact that she wrote erotic fiction on commission in the 1940s has always struck me as incredibly progressive for its time.

AM: But Anaïs Nin had exactly the worldview I just described. She wrote what a man would like to read about women. 

ES: That’s a very interesting point. 

AM: This really makes me mad – that everything is centered on men. Even female desire.

ES: Do you think that now it has been liberated from that notion, or has it gone to the other extreme?

AM: I think sometimes you must go to the other extreme in order to find balance. To discover who you are, what your body wants, what your soul needs.

“I think sometimes you must go to the other extreme in order to find balance. To discover who you are, what your body wants, what your soul needs.” 

ES:  Since you said you began writing as a conversation with writers you loved: if you were to host a dinner and invite them, what would it look like?

AM: Virginia Woolf, for sure. She’s heading the table. Kafka as well. But I hesitate, you know, because they might not be such a good company in real life. They are better companions in books. 

ES: Exactly. Sometimes you don’t want to meet your heroes…

AM: I don’t know how to put it, but at this point in my life, I need to be surrounded by people I love, and who love me. It’s no longer about meeting new people for the sake of it. I don’t need to meet famous writers or chase the idea of something extravagant like the Nobel Prize.