Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
Category Archive: 1958
There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness – it’s not an unusual thing – and maybe that’s not written about enough.
I’m not being naive; I realise there’s no such thing as a pure reading. But I’d rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.
Someone must transform income into the food, shelter, clothing, nurture, discipline, education, minding, nursing, transportation, and emotional support that creates life outside of the office, permits survival of the race, cares for the ill and disabled, and makes life livable when we can no longer care for ourselves.
I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author’s life.
What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works.
Certain things can’t be approximated, so I’m always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful… Brutal language isn’t necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.
Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women’s work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men.
I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, ‘Oh, well, that’s her story.’ We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It’s not my province; it’s ours. These questions concern us all.
I’ve said this before – and I mean it strongly – an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don’t believe it somehow viscerally, we don’t really take it in.