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Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, and still writing as well as she did at the start—if not better, which is really saying something, since if you look again at Lives of Girls and Women, her first book, you will see it is a masterpiece, not like any other first book I can think of offhand. (You will also find in it many of the elements of Love of a Good Woman and other later fiction—the obsession with drowning, the allure and menace of men, the erotic moment as narrative pivot and the glimpses of wickedness that only the young are able to act upon to save themselves; the middle-aged must attempt to endure, make do, compromised and complicitous, with what they know.) Her later fiction is quite bold structurally—its handling of time is fearless and satisfying and not to be imitated. She seems over and over again to be writing a kind of ghost story. She is also witty and cruel (that is, unblinking) and painterly. Although she writes of the provinces, she is the least provincial writer I can think of. I’m not sure that this is always understood about her.
on Alice Munro
[...] looking at my life I can see there are the standard childhood years of feeling a little unseen, which is misunderstanding of a fundamental sort and which typifies the female experience and is actually good for writing (as well as espionage) but bad for life. Most things good for writing are bad for life. “May your life be not very good material” is a blessing I offer students and small babies. Another writer friend of mine is fond of leaning over bassinettes and offering “may you never be reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.”
[...] the moment you give yourself permission to do it, which is a decision that is both romantic and bloody-minded—it involves desire and foolish hope, but also a deep involvement with one’s art, some sort of useful self-confidence, and some kind of economic plan. One’s life, especially one’s artistic life, is an interplay of many things and the timing of encouragement—from teachers or parents—is also one of the most important elements. Although both my parents are creative people in their way, I was not especially encouraged by them, which might have been good. I certainly don’t blame them. I think they believed you threw things at your children— lessons, books, music—and then let the children sort it out, that if you were too present or too committed to a child’s accomplishment in any area, the child would run away. This, of course, is not really true. Or rather it’s not extremely true. But I received most of my initial encouragement in college, from professors, and by then I was ready to absorb it. I didn’t have the financial freedom to be a writer and have always struggled with that, but I also knew I didn’t want to find myself sixty-five years old and ruing the moment in my youth when I became prematurely practical. I wasn’t at all sure whether I would be able to survive as a writer for the rest of my life. But I decided to keep going for as long as I could and let someone else lock me up for incurable insanity.
similar to what im always saying to myself about being bold while i'm young and still have the guts
He sighed with relief, listlessly checked his watch for the third or fourth time and frowned at the continuing nonappearance of his train. As he did so, his right hand semiconsciously sought out his gut, cupping and probing the surplus flesh as though searching for a key to its existence, some way perhaps to disentangle himself from it. Four years ago, at thirty-one, he had been slim, even skinny. Back then, not in truth so long ago as it seemed, his twin passions had been the flesh and the mind. More specifically, his loose-hipped girlfriend, Lucilla, and Carrying the Can, his PhD dissertation on television comedy. But ever since The Can had been published to quite favorable reviews, leading to both his appointment as Lecturer in Ocular Studies at the University of the Metropolis and, on the strength of his elation, to a proposal and consequent engagement to Lucilla, his feelings had begun to alter. All the energy he had once expended on lust and learning had been diverted into his feelings for food. He did not binge and purge, he was not exactly a problem eater, but dinner, he realized rather sadly, had become his favorite part of the day-more important than either the work that preceded it or the sex that, albeit less and less these days, came afterwards. The real turning point, he knew, although he shuddered to think of it, had come three years earlier, five months after the publication of The Can and as he was beginning research for his next book project, when it had become plain to Chester, suddenly and painfully plain, that he had reached the limits of his own cleverness. He was sitting in his office one afternoon reading an article on the phenomenology of video nasties when he realized with a start that it made no sense to him at all-the prose seemed, all of a sudden, as dense and pathless as an old-growth forest.
[...] His father, an electrical appliance salesman, was in himself a man of moderate wit and cheerfulness, but his profession had encouraged him to explore such unnatural extremes of affability that by the time he returned to the family home at six or seven o’clock he had nothing left for his wife and children but brevity and sourness. [...]
[...] How he wished he could cast it all off, admit his ignorance, embrace his normality. He entertained absurd fantasies of giving up his teaching job and becoming a plumber or a van driver instead. If he thought for more than a few minutes, however, he realized that this was impossible. The idea of normality still revolted him. The people he saw every day-with their haircuts, their glasses, their well-chosen shoes-they had never welcomed him before, and he had spent his adult life leaning away from them. How could he now seek succor in their ranks?
So, deported from the higher state of intellect and ideas, and unwilling to take up citizenship in a more mundane country of skin and bone, Chester had for the past three years been stuck in a limbo, stranded in a purgatorial Heathrow of indecision and inertia. His marriage remained an engagement, his book a few contradictory jottings, all he didassiduously and almost every hour-was eat. He guzzled up to seven meals a day, and the departmental snack bar became his de facto office.
lol
What kind of life must that be? Eight hours up and dowp on a train, into the Railway Arms to drink yourself silly, dinner from a frying pan, a terrible hangover and then begin again. Moving from job to job, shedding friends, gathering illnesses. Chester stopped chewing for a moment and let the possibility of desolate and dreary singleness sweep over him like a gust of secondhand smoke. He had always thought that life, his life at least, would end, whatever its meanderings and false starts, in an undefined but surely well-deserved, satisfaction. Now, as he pushed on towards forty, and in the sad half-light of this disheveled steward, it began to occur to him, slowly and embarrassingly late perhaps, that this was not necessarily so. Some mistakes once made were never rectified; some chances missed would never reappear. Looked at from this perspective, life struck Chester suddenly as harsh and inadequately explained, and happiness as a matter not of time but of desperate human effort.
She had met Chester at a house party in Bedfordshire in 1988, a month before her finals. By that point she had given up studying almost entirely. Her life was devoted to cocktail parties and the drama club, and the thought of writing an essay practically sent her to sleep. Chester, in contrast, was in the flush of graduate-student enthusiasm: his long, shy silences would be broken only by loud outbursts against formalism and in favor of Belgian semiotics. He struck her at first as an exotic oddity-as dark, intense and badly dressed as a Russian dissident. Once they had been out together a few times, however, she began to interpret his seriousness, his desperate almost painful need to succeed and his concomitantly dreadful if inarticulable awareness of failure, as a sign of maturity. None of the males she had been with before seemed to care very much about what was coming, probably because they assumed that their lives would be much like their parents’ except with more sex and better gadgetry. But for Chester the future was a fearsome, shaggy-headed ogre which every day he would have to wrestle to the ground and which every morning would be on its feet again strong and resistant as ever. Although these anxieties arose mainly from the particularities of his temperament and class, for Lucilla they were signs of a wonderfully premature oldness. At twenty-four he was fatherly. Within a month she had decided, in the silent but irreversible way of hers, that they had mated for life, and the actual events that followed: Chester’s appointment at the University of the Metropolis, his book, her sparkling success at The Daily Continent, their engagement, were to her just delightful bubbles on the surface-froth while the dark strong riptide of their life together ran irrefutably on.
It had taken quite a while for Chester’s growing girth and his continuing refusal to set a date to complicate this thinking. In the previous eighteen months they had attended twelve weddings, five christenings and a bris. The effects had been incremental; each on its own did not trouble her but taken together they signaled to Lucilla that at some point in the recent past the chronology of her life had gone seriously awry. Chester was fat and uncommunicative; she was wealthy and well-known; they talked only about television and restaurants, and rarely had sex. Theirs was the lifestyle of exhausted fifty-year-olds, but they were not even married. She had never given birth!
For Chester, who had never been abroad, it was all a delight and a revelation. Sitting in a bar the afternoon before they left, he looked around at the French people with their long, dark hair and unusual raincoats and thought how strange they seemed in some ways, but in other, more important ways, how familiar. He was one of them now. They were all in it together-loving, being loved, the great pandemonium of desire.
i just like that line