I think of speculative fiction as basically taking care of all of our needs when it comes to imagining ourselves, imagining ourselves doing better, imagining ourselves in the future, imagining ourselves in the past.
And then every so often you just stop yourself in awe and realize, these are Virginia Woolf’s letters! This is her paper, her ink, she wrote this — it’s not a facsimile.
My body is flawed and also falls outside of specific culturally-acceptable parameters and is also actively oppressed. It experiences pleasure and brings me joy and it suffers; I fight against it and love it and accept it and loathe it. How better to grapple with these contradictions than write a book about it?
I think we have to acknowledge that fiction does have that dangerous allure. Is it presumptuous? Sure. It’s a sacred enterprise, it’s the best means of empathy and understanding we have, and it’s also presumptuous.
I love that feeling of the unknown before I translate a book. It’s what a reader feels when starting to read a book for the first time. You have no idea what’s in store for you, but you’re eager to find out. And invariably you find yourself changed by the time you reach the end.
Young women are able to refuse to take some of bullshit that women of my generation had to live with. It’s exciting to see how willing young women are to speak up about sexual assault and sexism in general.
There are things in Mailer’s life that are hard for me to reconcile. I think all of his readers who like his work, there’s something that’s a little tough to get around.
The legacy of racist violence in this country bears heavily on my thinking when I’m casting about for ideas for my novels. I’m always thinking about race, violence, the history of the South, and how that history bears on the present.
In that big life story that you tell somebody—that myth that you tell people—you wouldn’t talk about things that just happened quietly every day and yet those things are the very material of that big sweeping story. Those little moments, those little interactions are who you are; every day is what makes up your life.
My mom believed that the way to get through life was to be as beholden as possible to white people. If she was in a room and a white person walked in, her whole body would get smaller. She tried really hard to teach me how to live like that—because it was the way to stay alive. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person you might wind up in a shallow grave somewhere.
When we first opened, a hen came into the store. We stayed calm, though we were thinking, if that chicken gets scared and starts flying around she’s going to poop on our books! Lucky for us, she wandered around, then with some gentle urging, walked out the way she walked in.
The meditative act of reading is a kind of resistance to a persistent and insidious dissolving of agency and our alienation by the forces of capitalism.
Just watching someone work at something so hard, putting years into it and going through really challenging moments with it because it’s a vital part of her life—it’s impossible for me to feel jealousy or to feel threatened.