Sometimes we talk about memory as though it’s firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.
If I leave the fictional world for too long, it’s a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before.
I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don’t.
Not long after watching ‘The Passenger,’ I wrote the first lines of ‘The Isle of Youth,’ which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.
We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.
I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality.
I’m such a first-person writer.
In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.
My students are often asking me, ‘What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?’ And one thing I always tells them is that it’s helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don’t know where the project is going.
For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions.
To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.
I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.
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