Heroes have to set out into the big wide world and have adventures in order to become heroes – otherwise there’d be no story. But what about heroines? 

Doris Dörrie recounts three journeys, to San Francisco, Japan and Morocco, describing what it’s like to travel the world as a woman. Facing the unknown and dealing with the foreign always means confronting your own fears, privileges and losses. But in the process, you become the heroine of your own tale.

In Living, Writing, Breathing, Doris Dörrie tells of the power of autobiographical writing, inspiring countless readers in the process. This book is her personal invitation to every one of us to reach for our own pen and write about our own lives. With inspiration and helpful tips, she encourages us to immerse ourselves in our own stories, to become more mindful of each individual moment and to embrace life’s contradictions.

»I write in order to celebrate and be fully conscious of this unbelievable opportunity: being alive.«
Doris Dörrie

What should Mimi do with the blank piece of paper that her father hands her? »But there is nothing on it,« complains Mimi. Then the two of them discover much more than just a story.

Mimi is supposed to be practising piano, but she is bored. She is listlessly tinkers away – when suddenly a boy in strange clothes and a white wig walks out of the piano. He plays piano like a virtuoso, never looking at the notes, and never making a single mistake …

Once again, Mimi's bedroom is in a state of chaos, but Mimi does not want to tidy up. Faced with her mother's impatience, Mimi begins to curse – and soon discovers that swearwords can have a very peculiar effect…

Doris Dörrie can never resist bringing back mementoes from her travels: an origami snail from Japan; a wrestling mask from Mexico; a rice goddess figurine from Bali, boxing boots from New York; or Borotalco, a miracle stain-erasing product from Italy. Useful things, knick-knacks, exotic foodstuffs, magic props and kitschy dust gatherers. Through her encounters with these items, Doris Dörrie talks in her uniquely intimate way about life, writing and travel.

With a pair of tights wound around her head, a sweater tied around her belly and golden sandals on her feet, Mimi rings at the door of her parents' home and tells her astonished mother that she is not Mimi today but Anne Other. As Anne Other, she does everything quite differently: she drinks her cacao without a fuss because milk is good for her bones, she cannot bear strawberry jam, which Mimi loves, and she allows Mrs Müller to tie her shoelaces because she cannot do it as well as Mimi. And then she tells Mimi's parents the terrible secret that has been concealed beneath Mimi's pillow for days…

Sixteen irresistible stories written in a dizzying array of moods and locales. With the compulsive focus of a video freak and the intensity of a hungry reporter covering a weird series of events, Doris Dörrie takes us on a magical misery tour of human behaviour. Ranging from the psychologically dark terrain of her native Germany to the bleak brilliance of southern California, the storis explore the longings of the lonely, the sad farces of the mismatched, and the dangerous comedy of those fuzzed-out enough to believe their own lies. Zooming in through the surface layers to explore the anarchy that lurks beneath, Dörrie allows little to escape her quietly ironic view.

They meet on a beach in Mexico: Alice, a somewhat confused young German woman on holiday with her married lover. And an American woman thirty years her senior, who Alice secretly calls ›the master‹. Because she’s everything that Alice wants to be. Elegant. Confident. Commanding in her relationships with men. And above all – she’s a writer. In order to get ›the master‹ to notice her, Alice has to think of something. A story, for example. And it works – but in a completely different way to how Alice had imagined. And yet, ›the master‹ herself had even warned her: writers suck you dry, they’re nothing but thieves and vampires.

Whether she writes about men, the father of the bride or the question »Am I beautiful?«, Doris Dörrie takes a close look, surprises us with unexpected twists and very refreshing comedy. Doris Dörrie's best stories in one volume.

Rudi and Trudi have been a couple for thirty years. When Trudi dies suddenly, Rudi flies to his son Karl in Japan to see what was important for Trudi and what they were no longer able to experience together: their son in Japan, the legendary cherry blossoms, Fujiyama and also the Butoh dance, which had been Trudi's great passion once upon a time. The book contains images from the film with the abbreviated version of the story in subtitles, the complete screen play and background information by Doris Dörrie about filming at Fujiyama, her relationship to Japan, the Butoh dance and about Zen. A book for the film, a book about the film, a book for after the film.

They consult I Ging, dabble in Buddhism, have their homes Chi'is tested and go in search of happiness at Sushi dinners or in Hollywood. The generation of today's mid-forties who set out to manage love, their families and their professions with so much more tolerance and coolness and so much better than their parents had done are now confronted by questions which cannot be answered simply by »positive thinking«. A young woman travels to Japan alone, hoping to instil new élan into her business. Luck is not on her side, however, and her contact man leaves her in the lurch. But her despair is caused not so much by her professional debacle as by her failing relationship with her husband: I even began reading the Dalai Lama and meditating in an attempt to save my marriage. Samsara: life is suffering. That did not exactly cheer me up. Following a road accident, Achim's wife Eva is in a coma. Achim visits her every day, reads to her and hopes for a reaction, but the doctors are at their wits' end. In an attempt to take his mind off the desperate situation, Achim gets swept along in the subway with a crowd of people on their way to a concert by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger has hardly taken hold of the microphone when Achim sees in his mind's eye Eva on their first journey together, and he hears them both join in singing with the band: satisfaction! This memory of the early days of their love gives him the strength to carry on. The fifteen-year-old Anna, whose mother is a food photographer, refuses to eat. She has to be artificially fed. Completely bewildered, her parents stand by her bed in hospital where Anna is being intravenously fed. If my jeans don't fit me any more I shall kill myself, thinks Anna in Germany in 1992. My mother doesn't understand that one's soul grows thin when one's body is fat, thinks the fifteen-year-old Anna in Italy in 1570 and decides to stop eating and become a martyr... In the alternation between the narrations, the alien and the all too familiar draw close together. Fifteen tragic and comic stories about yesterday and today which are not as far removed from one another as we sometimes think.

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Apple has her hippie mother Ingrid to thank for her silly name along with a few neuroses, and a love of ironed blouses. Apple does not ever want her life to be as chaotic as it was in the summer of 1976, when Apple's mother met Karl in Spain. Ingrid, the beach queen of Torremolinos, and Karl, a married bank employee, fell head over heels in love with one another – an affair which had unimaginable consequences. Thirty years later a grown-up Apple is stumbling from one love-life disaster to the next. Meanwhile her best friend Susi is looking for a holiday house in Spain. And Ingrid, now over sixty years old but still with the same rebellious free spirit, is going back to the scene of that disastrous summer love. They are all searching for the sunny side of life. But can you really book yourself some happiness just like a holiday, all inclusive?

The four stories of »Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing« comprise a modern survival manual on mating, marriage, and money, answering some of life's most urgent questions: how to find a man, how to dump him; how to protect your position as a mistress, or as a cuckold; how to maintain your dignity when spying on a lover; or how to salvage your credit rating when your husband loses his job. The result - wickedly funny and utterly fresh - heralds the emergence of a major international writer.