Articles by Lisa Peet
August 29, 2012
Post-40 Bloomer: David Abrams Taking As Long As It Takes 5
There doesn’t always need to be a dramatic story to later-life publication — sometimes a writer may just be spending a couple of decades reading, writing, working, and living enough to know what it is he’s writing about. Often those intervening years are simply about showing up.
May 30, 2012
Post-40 Bloomer: Mary Wesley, That Sort of Girl 3
There was no stopping her now. She wrote like a woman possessed, scrawling on the back of old manuscripts and whatever she could find. She had a soft touch for dark themes, offering deception and adultery the same respect as the rest of the natural world they occupied. The only sin she couldn’t forgive her characters was cruelty.
February 29, 2012
Post-40 Bloomers: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer 14
“It is not like learning a skill or a game at which, with practice, one gradually improves. One works hard all right, but what comes, comes all of a sudden and as a breakthrough. One hits on something… It is almost as if the discouragement were necessary, that one has first to encounter despair before one is entitled to hope.”
November 30, 2011
Post-40 Bloomers: Isak Dinesen, Her Own Heroine 8
In a 1957 New York Times interview, she was asked, “Do you then look on your own life as a ‘tale’?” “Yes, I suppose so,” she replied, “but in a sense only I can grasp. And, after all, the tale is not yet quite finished!”