Interviews
“As I wrote the book, my interest ended up circling around the issue of narratives and how sometimes we invest in a narrative and then we discover we can’t sustain that narrative anymore. What do we do when that happens? It felt really important to me as a subject —maybe it’s just the age that I’ve reached, or what was going on for me at the time I was writing, plus COVID. That is probably at the heart of what I wanted to convey: that it can feel devastating when we have to give up or revise a narrative, but we can survive that. That’s very much something that Eliot’s talking about in Middlemarch.”
Read the Exeter Bulletin interview.
“There’s a gentleness and rhythmic-ness to the experience of reading her [Eliot], because it is about daily life…. But what I love about Eliot is she makes the everyday, in the end, so dramatic. She shows how high the emotional stakes are.”
Watch the interview at A Mighty Blaze.
“I want people to read [Middlemarch] and see the humor in the novel. It’s a classic, and Eliot has a reputation for gravitas, but it’s a funny, funny book. It’s also a book you can return to at intervals throughout your life and read differently. My hope is that people can be unafraid of Middlemarch. I want to convey that although the novel is 150 years old, it can still mean a great deal to someone born in 1963 or 1983 or 2003.”
Read the Publishers Weekly interview.
“I never feel I have a book until I've found [the voice of the narrator] and I know what the voice is--that voice represents a point of view, a way of looking at the world. When I have that way of looking at the world, then I know what the sound of that voice is—whether it’s in first person or third person—and the words start to come. Until that point I may have material but I don't have a book.”
Listen to the interview with Joseph Scapellato at Exile in Bookville
“[Writing] is the formal opposite of the demagogic speech, meant for mass audiences, that we've experienced in this country recently. Writing reaches one reader at a time and is experienced in privacy. It’s a chance for one quiet voice to reach one patient listener. This is very, very important now.”
Read the interview at The Author Guild
“I originally wrote Matasha for National Novel Writing Month—you know, where you challenge yourself to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I thought it would be fun . . . Matasha was my first major experience of discovering plot as I wrote.”
Read the interview at The National Book Review
"I tried to think of good reasons [childbirth] might be an underdeveloped area in fiction . . . I think it comes down to the female genitals, and that people are still really uncomfortable with that."
—Listen to the interview on The Brian Lehrer Show
(not an interview, but a gracious introduction to my novels by author Dan Raeburn, followed by a reading)
--Watch the intro/reading at University of Chicago
"I'm not even sure I know exactly what's going to happen after the last page . . . When you have a new child, the future is ambiguous. You don't know what's going to happen to that child. The healthiest, most robust child — anything could happen six months from now or a year from now; and children have their own totally unforeseeable personalities and lives that they grow into."
Listen to the interview on NPR's Weekend Edition
"It seems as if childbirth, this absolutely enormous event in the life of billions of people past and present, is seen as a `small' topic. It’s absurd."
Read the interview at The Millions
"I wanted to show a woman going through the particular trial of childbirth and show what she brought to it, how she rearranged herself to handle it . . . I see the novel as more about what we bring to pain—good or bad—than about what pain does to us."
Read the interview at the Tin House blog
“I realized that boarding school was a particularly extreme environment that encapsulated a lot of things I wanted to talk about when it came to the 1970s.”
Conversation with Jonathan Dee about The Virgins at The Center For Fiction, NYC (author had laryngitis but is still comprehensible!)
Watch the video
"Sex is not a neutral experience. Life is not a neutral experience. When things happen, we interpret them according to the stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are."
Read the interview at The Brooklyn Rail
"The teenagers in The Virgins exist in this very brief window of time when sex wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be, particularly dangerous. All of a sudden it supposedly could be unencumbered and all about joy and pleasure. Except that even when the unnecessary dangers are removed, sex is still connected to deep and complicated human needs and longings and fears. So it’s rarely unencumbered, especially when you’re just starting out."
Read the interview on The Tin House Blog
"You went off to this place that might be hundreds of miles away from your home, and there were no parents there. There were no parents! You're all revved up and hormonal and you're figuring out your identity and you're half crazy—and there are no parents."
Listen to the interview at Booktalk Nation
“It’s probably impossible for a human being to live without some sort of sensual life. Human contact and human sensuality are too threatening for Gorse, but he’s able to enjoy touch and sight and smells through his connection to plants.”
Read the interview at The Elegant Variation
“I've always liked writing male characters and from a male point of view. That's partly because when I do so, it's plain to me that the character is a fiction, is not me.”
Read the interview at American Chronicle
“I’d been musing about the yearning for the perfect partner, the perfect reflecting mirror, someone who understands one completely all the time. A wonderful or a chilling ideal, depending on your point of view.”
Read the interview at The Smoking Poet
“Most of us have some piece of ourselves that strives for connection and doesn’t quite know how to make it, or that craves solitude and fears it also. I think those are pretty universal things.”
Watch the interview on SOMA TV’s Books in Action
"Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
"A: When I was in first grade, my teacher took stories we had written in class and stapled them between colored construction-paper covers. Then, unbeknownst to us, she submitted them to a Scholastic competition. I won a ribbon for one of my pieces. I was called down to the principal’s office, told about the prize, and given a candy cane. I was thrilled! I’d always liked to write stories, but after that I had the idea that it was a good gig and something I should do when I grew up."
Read the interview at RenderForest