Meet Maine’s Indian American Senate Challenger Sara Gideon’s Equally Accomplished Sister
- Melanie Gideon, an accomplished writer, is extremely well regarded in the literary circles. She remains removed from the world of politics and her history making race of her younger sister.
Next only to Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Sara Gideon is an Indian American candidate running for one of the highest offices in 2020 and will make history if she were to unseat incumbent Republican Senator from Maine, Susan Collins. Three days before the election, Sara Gideon has a slight edge over Collins in what is considered one of the most expensive races in Senate history.
According to a poll conducted by Survey USA for the electoral reform group FairVote and released by Bangor Daily News, Sara Gideon has a one-percentage-point lead over Sen. Collins.
Sara Gideon, currently the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, however, is not the only famous Gideon. Meet Melanie Gideon, the 56-year-old, older sister of Sara Gideon.
Melanie Gideon is a celebrated New York Times best-selling author. She escaped attention as the sister of the challenger of one of the most contentious Senate battles, perhaps because the sisters chose to keep it that way.
A private person, Melanie Gideon is quite a ghost on social media. Gideons are daughters of immigrants – an Indian father, a pediatrician and a second-generation Armenian mother, a psychiatrist. Both them, along with two other siblings, were born and raised in Rhode Island. Other than this there doesn’t seem to be too much more information on Gideon’s parents.
Melanie Gideon lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her techie husband Ben Rewis and son, also named Ben. She appears not to be involved in her sister’s high-profile race on the other coast.
Growing up in Rhode Island and wanting to be a writer since she was 11, Melanie Gideon’s first novel “The Girl Who Swallowed the Moon” was published by a small press in 1994. “I actually wrote fake blurbs that would go on the back of my future book,” she said in an interview with Everygirl adding, “For example I would write ‘Melanie Gideon has written a masterpiece and I think she is so wonderful and brilliant I have now adopted her as my daughter,’ – Madeleine L’Engle, author of “A Wrinkle in Time.”
“That was one of those books that made me want to be a writer.”
Today, Melanie Gideon is the best-selling author of the novels “Wife 22,” “Valley of the Moon” and the memoir “The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After” (2009). In this book, Gideon chronicles with self-effacing humor, the mundane of everyday life – a trip to Trader Joe’s or waiting in the car-pool line. Primarily a series of vignettes and observations—but what pulls it together is the author’s dry, self-deprecating wit about situations that manage to seem both vividly unique and universal. For instance, her husband insists on wearing a helmet when he surfs, and she’s embarrassed by him. Her kid wants her to take him to Target the night before Halloween to get him a new costume, but she’s tired and tries to put him in the “jailbird” costume she wore in college instead.
The “tell-some” memoir discusses her sister Sara before she got into politics.
Melanie Gideon is also the author of three young adult novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages.
Melanie Gideon’s talent seems to translate to every genre. Her work includes young adult fantasy, memoire, adult contemporary, and with her latest, “Valley of the Moon,” she dips her toe into the pools of time-travel, magical realism, and historical fiction.
Her “Modern Love” column for The New York Times was adapted into “The Slippery Year” (2009), a candid and comical mediation on the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood. This book was chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book for 2009.
The predecessor to “Valley of the Moon” (2016) was her first adult novel, “Wife 22” (2013) which was released in 30 different countries and acquired by Working Title films for the big screen.
She has written for The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, More, Shape, Marie Claire, the London Times, the Daily Mail and other publications.
Anu Ghosh immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1999. Back in India she was a journalist for the Times of India in Pune for 8 years and a graduate from the Symbiosis Institute of Journalism and Communication. In the U.S., she obtained her Masters and PhD. in Communications from The Ohio State University. Go Buckeyes! She has been involved in education for the last 15 years, as a professor at Oglethorpe University and then Georgia State University. She currently teaches Special Education at Oak Grove Elementary. She is also a mom to two precocious girls ages 11 and 6.