I certainly worried, wondering whether I could pull it off. But I either had to write a second book or disappear. Much better, I thought, to get on with it.
We should cheer for writers who pay painstaking attention to language and character, who push the form forward. I just don’t know if we should label them.
People in MFA fiction programs say, "At least you know what you're writing about.” I say, “I actually don't.” That's why I'm interested in writing about it.
It’s a moral imperative to at least state what everybody should do even though it’s so hard. Then we’ll gradually muddle our way toward something better.
This is about disability. It’s about this sense of internalized ableism. About not feeling less. If I had to pick one thing, that’s what the book’s about. It’s about figuring out that you’ve believed a pack of lies all your life.
There are always articles floating around about how we think with our guts...rationalizing our instincts when we believe ourselves to be carefully deliberating. The mind almost never knows why the body wants, which can be either scary or restful, depending on your relationship to having an orderly existence.
What I remember and miss now, being out of that stage of the writing process, was the feeling of something being unlocked. It was always a little beyond language, just a sense of possibility, a door opening in my brain after I’d been hitting a wall. Despondency giving way to hope.
One thing that must have been in my mind as I worked on the stories in this collection was the violence of gentrification and the way it has been rapidly changing New York City and the lives of many of the people who have lived here.
I wish I had some great, articulate account of being a male author writing in a woman's voice, but I don't. It was a voice—Emma's voice—that simply began to exist within me.
We frame strength as having power. But isn’t strength also when you have no power but you still manage to maintain your integrity, even though the world is completely beating you down.
My books are my attempt to defy death and the fact that most of us will eventually be forgotten, and tragically quickly. It’s a mission that will ultimately fail.
Television has been elevated to an art form. You can watch 12 straight episodes of Westworld and feel like you’ve done something important. However, reality TV still functions as this lowbrow piece of culture.
I always need to be writing because just living — and this is probably a fault of mine — living in the moment is not my forte. Sometimes when I am just alive, I forget to live in the moment. I feel like there is nothing is tethering me to the planet. Yet, when I write it makes me feel like — I guess it makes me feel less depressed. It makes me feel like, okay, I can do this. It makes sense why I am here.
I got shingles, I lost the ability to feed myself. But it’s expected. It happens to every writer at some point in the process. It’s actually kind of heartening to be like, “This will kill you, or come close.”