A Project of Defiance: The Millions Interviews C Pam Zhang

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As a woman of color, I take it as my task to let my imagination expand into the spaces of erasure. 
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Making Sense of Trauma: The Millions Interviews Melanie Abrams

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Most writers have experienced some kind of trauma. Why else would we feel propelled to do this excruciating work if not partly to make sense of some of our wounds?
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An American Nightmare: The Millions Interviews Dave Eggers

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For a liberal democracy, this is as far as we can go toward illiberal authoritarianism without completely breaking the American experiment.
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Too Beautifully Sinister Not to Indulge: The Millions Interviews Adam Wilson

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I keep trying to make every project as different from the previous one as possible, but I inevitably end up back on my bullshit, as the kids say.
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Searching for Home: The Millions Interviews Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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My mother and father were my first environmental teachers, and watching them hold their heads up high while they experienced racism and still maintained their sense of wonder absolutely informs how I shaped this book.
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Pointing Toward Truth: The Millions Interviews David Hollander

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I don’t really know what the lesson here is. It’s not exactly this uplifting story of perseverance, but it does seem like I had to surrender all hope before something good could happen.
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Into the Wild: The Millions Interviews Alden Jones

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I’m not saying memoirists should never use marriage as a final plot point. But if we can choose something else, if we resist that expectation, we can ask the culture to consider other ways women come to resolution.
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Rethinking Suburbia: The Millions Interviews Jason Diamond

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I think Cheever really did a fantastic job of summing up what is dark and odd and messed up about the suburbs, and I think the suburbs do a fantastic job of summing up what is wrong with America in many ways.
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Over the Brink of Disaster: The Millions Interviews Elisa Gabbert

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The only way to get through time alive is to spend a lot of it pretending that everything’s fine.
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Craft Corner: The Millions Interviews Christopher Beha

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"Setting out to write a "big" book feels like a very male—or maybe Mailer-ite—ambition, in the worst possible way."
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Always Make it Personal: The Millions Interviews Adrian Tomine

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"I’ve always said that I’m constantly trying to trick myself into the mindset of when I first started making comics as a teenager."
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Dissecting Desire: The Millions Interviews Sarah Gerard

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Toxic relationships are hurtful, and exist on a continuum of uncaring and manipulative behavior, ranging from microaggressions to violence. It haunts us because it hurts us.
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Nobody’s Martyr: The Millions Interviews Shannon Reed

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I do try to love all of my students, and meet them where they are, then help them move a little bit further down the road.
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Our Private and Public Lives: The Millions Interviews Sanaë Lemoine

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I could feel myself becoming restless and wanting my narrator to grow with me, make wiser choices, but instead I had to stay in her world, refine it and dig deeper into the questions I was exploring.
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Art Imitates Life: The Millions Interviews Sam Lansky

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One of my frustrations with the rhetoric of self-care, especially as it’s tied up with contemporary mysticism, is it can feel so rarefied and classist. But self-love and self-acceptance should not be solely available to people of a certain tax bracket.
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Bulletproof Coffee to Bulletproof Vest: An Object Lessons Interview

The interesting thing is that you start out writing about an object, whatever it is, and you wind up thinking about people or place, relationships or personal history.

Fate, Capitalism, and Football: The Millions Interviews Katherine Hill

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I think many of us are looking to bust out of the current conventions of novel structure, which somehow feel so fixed. Which is interesting to me because the novel is actually a pretty unregulated form.
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The Desire Not to Be: The Millions Interviews Garth Greenwell

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One of my most central beliefs about literature is that literature is a way of looking. It doesn’t have to do with extraordinary or unusual events. It has to do with a particular attitude taken toward the world.
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