I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
From Ben Marcus
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.
I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.
Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.
My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives