Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil.
There were three sides to a marriage: public and private and who-fucking-knows, one lived and one performed and one a thundering mystery.
Looking back, she supposed that had been one miracle of their marriage--even if a person was on the brink of swallowing fingernails and the other was thinking deeply about a problem they could not share, there was still someone to hold you as you wept through the night.
I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.
Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.
In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.
Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.
I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.
As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit.
In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.
When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.
Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.
I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.
I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.
Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.
If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'
Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.
I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.
In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.
