I fell in love with you again; While you were away – Jack Salmon.
I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.
You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
I’m not a slash-and-burn kind, and I’m also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It’s like walking down the street – what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative – that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.
Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I’m just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
She didn’t even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house – it was the eyes, her dancer’s carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
Well, it’s my voice, so it’s more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it’s very different from writing fiction.
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.
Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?
There was one thing my murderer didn’t understand; he didn’t understand how much a father could love his child.
In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.
I’m just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That’s my level of involvement.
I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
I have never been shy about listening to the input of others and weighing it seriously.