For the most part, I'd say it's exhilarating.
For the most part, it feels great.
It feels like you can just invent your life
and all you have is a page or a screen.
And that's all you have, the rest has been assumed,
has been borrowed or inherited.
It's all been-- none of it is how you necessarily
need to proceed.
The frustration is in feeling I have so far to go
and I feel that line in the piece I just read, Where Does
Your Life Go comes from so many places in me
because I feel that the last--
now I've written 10 books and they've all
been in apprenticeship.
I've just learned by working so hard
and writing so much what might be possible.
And so it's a difficult place to be
and how much one will get to do and of course,
with all the other circumstances of one's life.
It's a little bit difficult in that
I can never dream of supporting myself as a writer.
So I never will have full time to write.
And none of my books has been easy to publish.
Every single one of them has been an enormous struggle
in one way or another.
And I could go into lots of war stories, but it's just really--
it's just the case.
That part is hard.
But for me when I knew I was going to be a writer,
the notion of just getting close to putting one's hand,
fingerprints on a page, just doing whatever
you could do to get close to that,
to live next to what's essentially
the great mysteries every day-- not to master them
or to understand them but to just be next to them
seem to me an amazing way to spend one's time on the Earth.
And so for the most part, it's just a great--
it's just a great privilege to be able to do it.
It's emotionally draining also a lot of the time.
I wrote a book called Defiance, which I thought
was just going to be a lark about a woman waiting
to be executed on death row for murdering
two of her favorite students.
And I thought it would just be fun to do while I'm teaching
and directing the program.
I became indicted emotionally in a way I had no idea.
I had no idea what was happening to me as I wrote this thing.
And I think there's a lot of--
there's a lot of--
there's a lot of exhaustion.
I feel like I'm always tired.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that there
are a lot of writers who have drinking problems or drug
problems or have other problems because I
do think that there are certain things that
are rest from perception.
But nothing else is that you're constantly
emotionally invested and trying to find
the shapes for language.
And then language is just so much greater than any of us.
Being at the altar of the unsayable
constantly is emotionally exhausting too.
So but mostly, it's just great.
Mostly.
And it varies, of course, book by book too.
So yeah.
Hear she's very frisky.
I haven't seen the movie yet.
But I hear she's very physically able, and that interests me
that it's a huge--
I mean, to go back again to Frida as the painter,
that it's a huge part of where those paintings came from
was that pain and what that was like,
the rhythm of that every day, the feel of that all of that.
And so that interests me.
I also-- the idea of retrieving Frida interests me
because she's so maligned and she's so
made to feel like just a someone who
feminists have taken and done something with and elevated
and she's really an extraordinary painter.
But that she used all of this stuff.
That she used the stuff of her life in order to make
it is true.
I feel that way about Plath too, and she's a great poet.
And I feel like she's much maligned
because of the circumstances of her life.
And anyway, again, I think that to leave something out
as huge as that is problematic.
Yeah.
Well, I had Rose--
I had Rose when I was over 40.
And felt like I understood certain things
about concentration and stamina artistically
so that I could at least get back to that writing space
maybe.
After setting out on this thing, I
knew not what it was going to be at all.
And in fact, I've found that--
again, talk about exhaustion.
We were talking about this earlier.
It's another kind of exhaustion and yet it's
also a window onto something.
My work is even more tender and even more vulnerable
now than it ever was because of understanding what it means now
to have a little soul to move through the world in a way.
I lost her for awhile.
I was in New York.
I didn't lose her, but I didn't know where she was.
And this note was brought up in you and it's
a fervor like no other and yet it's
close to artistic fervor too, the devotional aspect,
the notion of just taking care and being--
and you're always being watched so you've
got to be better than you ever could be.
And I feel like the work demands that of me too.
That it's watching me and so I need to be a better person
and be a better writer and risk more and be more there.
And this is same thing.
So motherhood is very, very similar in some ways.
And teaching, I find a little bit that way too.
So it's lucky I don't teach very much.
I only teach one semester a year now,
but it's all part of the same thing really.
It's all incredibly creative acts, I think.
And so, so enormous really.
I'm writing now, though, in the book The Bay of Angels children
have taken it over.
I mean, utterly.
There's this huge fantasy where these children are escaping
in Germany and I'm thinking, how can I-- how can I
rationalize narrative.
Because now I really think about when
to write a linear narrative, how it works, why it
would work as opposed to other.
And in this case, these kids have just
got to get out of this place.
I've got to keep things happening and moving so
that they can get out of there.
And so formally, it's a way for me
to use a linear narrative in a way
that I can still believe in.
And that's interesting.
But kids are everywhere, they've taken over the book.
And I knew in Ava actually that Ava had a miscarriage,
a stillbirth really.
And this book opens and surrounds that a lot.
And also her aunt Sophie from that book died at Treblinka
and was shot into a ditch when she was seven months pregnant.
So the children are just everywhere
and it's very interesting.
Then Rose becomes something else where she is--
I write down her knock-knock jokes,
I write down everything she does and everything she--
and it becomes-- she becomes part of the work and a living
real way.
So it's very interesting.
Still I'm not sure I have the temperament to be a mother.
I'm very, very solitary and it demands
that you be there in ways that are superhuman for someone
as solitary as myself.
So I don't know, but there you have it.
She's there.
Can you talk a little bit about returning to the character.
Yeah.
All of I'm not really returning to her as I never left her.
I've been working on this book already for 10 years,
and I think Ava was published in '93 so almost 10 years.
I mean, I've been continually--
I always felt I wasn't a good enough writer yet
to write this next book.
And so all these other projects intervened
and it was my scales while I was getting
in the best shape I could in order to write the book.
But then I started to realize I was
going to lose it if I didn't really sit and begin
composition.
So she's always been there.
And Ava is the only book of mine that I've written and has not
stayed shut.
It hasn't stayed over.
It's unfinished in every way and it's an odd book.
It doesn't live within its covers easily.
It's fluid in a strange way.
I can't quite articulate and yet it's the case.
And so for a while, I tried to just
to understand that as the oddness and the strange book
that it was.
It was written in one draft.
It was written quickly.
It was written in a bit of a trance.
And everything in my books, I mean, they're all different.
But some might go through a million drafts
and some might have been written in one draft.
And yet it's never left really.
And so I went back or I never left really to stay with it.
Again, it really varies from project to project.
In something like-- some books come mysteriously from
I'll find myself in a museum all the time.
I'm wondering, Oh, I love museums.
So I wonder why I keep looking at this
and keep going back and back.
And I just want to trust it.
I don't worry about it too much.
And then from there, the art love
started materializing as visual concerns
and then became an idea, became an idea
about the relationship between the perfection of one's
perfection of the kind of painting and a life and how
those two things.
And so I started writing around that idea
little bit and constructed a fiction.
And during the writing of that fiction,
my own life intervened in ways.
And I didn't understand it.
But, my best friend--
this was in 1985--
was diagnosed with AIDS at a time when
no one knew what it was, what anything other than what you
have got the flu and the next day
you're going to die sort of thing.
And so I stopped writing that book utterly
because I just didn't think I could--
I just couldn't be writing this thing, these perfect sentences.
I worked so hard in my first book
to learn how to write a perfect sentence.
And then they just all seemed utterly false
and utterly suspect.
If I couldn't get close to--
in the morning, I would be writing this book.
In the afternoon, I would be walking to St. Vincent's
Hospital to visit him and to watch him
under this fluorescent light of day after day dying.
And then I come home and I try to write this late
in the morning.
And I go back again and I go back and forth.
This is the time when I had a grant from someplace.
I wasn't working at the time.
And it just silenced me utterly finally.
And not until I understood that this had to be--
this had to be part of the book itself,
that this had to be this experience and that
there's this--
the book's divided into sections--
spring, summer, fall, winter, more winter and spring.
And in the more winter section, it's
just-- it breaks from the fiction utterly
and it's just me talking to Gary after his death.
And then it resumes in fiction again.
But I needed--
I needed to do this in order for a lot of reasons.
But in order to continue to be a writer at all.
And so while, I became an idea somehow
then it entered the form formal.
I'm most interested in form probably
in the formal aspects of something.
Like when it became clear I was keeping
these notebooks of fragments because I was promoting
one of my books, which I hate doing going out
and doing all of the things one needs to do.
And so to keep my sanity, I would just
write a little fragment of something
every day, like something overheard, something--
this is just the pleasure of writing one line.
And I would collect these sentences, sentence
after sentence after sentence.
And ordinarily, what I would do is
try to make a shape out of some of it
or look and see what I had or try to understand
what it was about.
And all I noticed was there was a sensibility
there of some sort.
Then Bush-- the Bush father, Senior, decided to--
the Gulf War began.
And I became so enraged that I just
decided no, I'm not going to--
I'm not going to buy into that traditional narrative,
that narrative which I started to perceive of as an inherited
narrative of tyranny, a tyrannical narrative in which I
the writer was going to tell you what to think.
And I knew something you didn't know
and I was going to make up this story for you.
Seemed to me just appalling under the circumstances.
And it's interesting that now he was coming up anyway.
That became Ava.
I just decided to let it stand with very little anything
to it.
That readers are actually--
that it's exciting to write the story yourself.
It's exciting to have these fragments,
these pieces, these bits.
And I understood that the sensibility
was one that was abstracting, that was breaking down,
that was changing, that was--
so it became clear to me it was the last day.
It was a dire moment in this woman's life.
And then it became clear after a much longer time
that it was the last day of her life.
And every book has a story.