Activity

ozick: Ah! When I’ve taught those classes, I always say, “Forget about “Write about what you know.’ Write about what you don’t know.” The point is that the self is limiting. The self—subjectivity—is narrow and bound to be repetitive. We are,after all, a species. When you write about what you don’t …

OZICK: Quentin Bell’s biography told the story of his aunt, who happened to be the famous writer Virginia Woolf. But it was a family story really, about a woman with psychotic episodes, her husband’s coping with this, her sister’s distress. It had, as I said, the smell of a household. It was not ab…

ozick: [Resumes typing] The Modernist Dream. I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his coming on the scene whenit was alreadytoo late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel. But I was ambitious that way too. I no longer believe in Literature, …

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the feeling of first publication?

ozick: I was thirty-seven years old. I had the baby and the galleys together, and I sat at my desk—the same desk I use now, the same desk I inherited from my brother when I was eight years old—correcting the galleys with my right ha…

INTERVIEWER: Whatsustained you without publication during that period?

OZICK: Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature. I had a youthful arrogance about my“powers,” and at the same time a …