What drives the Year in Reading alum and Boy, Snow, Bird author Helen Oyeyemi? If we can believe her interview with The Globe and Mail, it isn’t just the enjoyment she derives from writing fiction. When asked why she wrote her new book, she said: “A few reasons, but mainly to see if I could…at this point, it’s perversity that keeps me writing.”
Sick
Secret Space
Recommended Reading: Over at Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes about the importance of secrets for a child’s development and in children’s literature.
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“Sunset: bitter orange and almond milk”
Recommended Reading: “Joseph Brodsky in Venice (1981)” by Campbell McGrath, one of the best poets in South Florida.
“I have a lot of feelings about the meeting.”
I highly recommend reading Jennifer Gilmore’s emotional essay on meeting “the birth mother.”
The Remains of the Screen
“Any reasonably skilled novelist can evoke on the page the texture of memory, drawing the reader into the half-remembered, the blurred edges, the nervous nostalgia, the meandering associations across time and geography. In contrast, flashbacks on screen tend always to be clumsy beasts, announcing their arrival with unwanted fanfare and knocked-over furniture. Why is this?” Kazuo Ishiguro on film, and other novelists’ second-favorite art forms.