That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
The ‘good’ mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the ‘bad’ mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.
I’m a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
I don’t really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
I am a good and interested mother – which has surprised me.
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it’s also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.
I absolutely don’t dislike children – I would choose their company over adult company any time.
I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.
Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn’t necessarily prove anything.
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one’s ability to perceive others.
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it’s the humanitarian principle he’s defending, I suppose.
Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.