[b]Meg Wolitzer
Maybe she had “no more books left inside her,” as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.[/b]
Better that than ''no books inside you at all".
Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.
Right, like there really is nothing new under the sun.
When do I stop? When I’m tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give it up forever.
Let’s name the folks here who should give it up forever.
You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.
And then every once in a while the talented husbands of powerful women.
I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I’ve brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It’s like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It’s a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that’s not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here’s a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That’s incredibly moving to me.
Of course nowadays most of what see on the news is fiction.
Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say.
You know, when that matters.