I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.
I was hit by a car when I was 13, and the rumour was immediately that I had been playing chicken with the car with my best friend Kenny in front of the Nutmeg Pantry, which was the only shop in Sharon. In fact, the guy who hit me was inebriated.
If a writer I represent gets a bad or unfair review, I suffer. I'm upset and outraged and do everything I can to try and change that. But I would never do that on behalf of my own book because I wouldn't expect my writers to do that.
I think growing up in such a small town - before cell phones, before the Internet, before Facebook, before we had access to people's interiors - there was a great deal of space between people's lives. I spent a lot of time imagining into the lives of the people I grew up with.
In college, I would follow Bob Dylan around, and I would show up to a concert, and he would sing some song he hadn't sang in a long time, and it would speak to something, and I would think it had some great fateful implication.
William Kittredge's 'Hole in the Sky' is one of my favorite books. Ian Frazier's 'Family' I adore.
