No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
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