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In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—­what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the…

I asked the woman if she liked the president and his wife. She told me that she didn’t like them or dislike them, because she wasn’t interested in them as individuals but as representative historical actors. I didn’t know what she meant by that, “representative historical actors,” so I asked her to…

His real life, outside of our destination, was complicated by ambivalence. Since childhood, his basic needs had been met as if by an invisible force. At first, he believed his mother and father were providing for him, but when they died, he was surprised to feel that he had suffered no loss. He env…

It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. Multiple things even. Had to. It was part of life,…

INTERVIEWER

How are you going to cancel someone who writes, “The trees were full of silver-­white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled”?

HAYES

Beauty can’t be canceled. O’Connor is problematic, but she’s indispensable. I think of Calvino’s “Uses of Literature,” his notion of a univer…