American - Novelist | 1966 -
There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.
Claire Messud
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I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.
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Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.
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Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions.
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If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
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Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
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If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.
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The way I saw the world as a child was not wrong. And it's okay to see the world that way. If it doesn't hurt anybody.
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I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it?
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I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea.
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I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.'
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If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it.
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