Carlisle is the granddaughter of renowned Russian writer Leonid Andreyev. She grew up in Paris, but travelled to Russia in the 1960s, where she befriended that country's most prominent writers. For 20 years she was exiled from Russia because of her friendship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose work she published in the west. She returned to her native country in 1989 to find it vastly changed. Her new memoir is "Under A New Sky: A Reunion with Russia."