The Keeper of the Walls (80 page)

M
onique Raphel High
is a Franco-American author. She was born in New York City to French parents who met in the expatriate community where each had taken refuge during the Nazi Occupation of France. When she was only a few months old, her parents returned to Europe, where she was reared in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam.

Monique graduated from secondary school in Paris at 16, and was admitted to Barnard College of Columbia University as a foreign student. She graduated with a double major in Renaissance Studies and English literature.

Monique taught writing at UCLA in the 1990s, and was such a popular teacher that her students asked her to take them beyond what was available at the university. She formed her own workshops and seminars, entitled WriteHigh, which eventually turned into a literary agency in the early 2000s with offices in Beverly Hills, New York, Paris and London. She discovered a number of writers who have since become well-known, such as Jill Smolinski and Janis Thomas, and nonfiction authors Candy Deemer and Nancy Fredericks. Monique's writing methods involved pairing authors to write scenes involving characters from both their books, having group therapy with a licensed therapist for the book characters, and outlining detailed plot lines and the emotional development of each book character on elaborate, colored charts.

She is now in the finishing stages of a totally different kind of novel, inspired by her late husband, the litigator and courtroom orator.
Irrevocable Trust
is a legal thriller as well as an emotional journey of self-discovery, flashing back to Nazi-Occupied France and set in Los Angeles in 1985, before the use of DNA and the enactment of sexual harassment laws.

Monique and her Persian chinchilla cat, Sebastian, live in Los Angeles, California, shuttling between her home and that of her British author-photographer fiancé, Paul Harrison. She has served on the Board of the L.A. Commission on Assaults Against Women, and was President of her class at Barnard from 2009-2014. She has been a member of the Alliance Française and returns frequently to France and Europe.

Monique's fans range from India to Russia, with a heavy concentration in Central and Latin America.

Connect with Monique Raphel High:

• @moniquehigh
  
• monique.high