inspo/characterisation
Michael Ondaatje,
Francesco Pacifico,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Rachel Kushner,
Victor Serge,
Richard Powers,
Mary Beth Keane,
Sally Rooney
nice character descriptions (fiction, memoir, journalism)
Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was. She had brothers and sisters and was raised by them, passing their names down to us.
Her face, my mother’s, is not clear to me. A boneless, soft prettiness, with small brown eyes and the scarcest of eyebrows, darkened with a lead pencil.
There was a man who brought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need. He was a romantic figure, mostly because he had studied French and adored the difficult r’s of that language. He was tall and good-looking and not very truthful. He was corrupted by an uncertain nature and no one understood his fits of self-expansion or his disappearances into torpor and melancholy. And yet a vanity and rather pleasant carelessness seemed to survive in all his moods.