I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
I didn't know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.
Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.
Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.