ABOUT ME
I am, before most things, a writer.
I mean this as a matter of perception. A painter thinks in light. An architect thinks in space. I think in observations, patterns, context.
I/ ABOUT ME
Inside Job
I am especially interested in the stories people tell themselves.
The games they play, why they do what they do, who they are inside their shells and—most importantly—what tips them over from love into cruelty, or confidence into fear, or the lifelong principle into that singular exception that often costs them everything.
I think most of us need a private myth to live with ourselves. We edit. We omit. We exaggerate. Some people are better at this than others. Intelligent people are often the best.
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When Life Gives You Eggs
When Life Gives you Eggs
I had imagined, when I was a student, that I would live a bohemian life.
I studied philosophy. I became interested in art, beauty, and the usual large questions a twenty-year-old asks herself, when it seems entirely possible that thinking hard enough about Husserl and the phenomenological reduction might exempt you from an ordinary life.
My life turned out to be very ordinary in ways, and extraordinary in others.
I was twenty-five when I learned to make a proper omelette, and I remember thinking, with a manic optimism, that other things might now be possible.
Everything I knew changed.
I left for New York and found myself living a very different life from the European one I had imagined. I learned all the petty disasters and unexpected pleasures of ordinary work. I learned about money, class, survival, starting again. Books have obviously taught me a great deal, but pressure and people have taught me incomparably more. I began to see how much people resemble each other across very different worlds. The clothes and words change. The coreographies often continue.
People still want to be loved, desired, respected. They still lie to themselves. They still get the important things wrong, act against their better sense, and account for it all with extraordinary coherence.
That became much more interesting to me than philosophy.
Under Pressure
When Life Gives You Eggs
III / ABOUT ME
I developed an interest in families, wealth, and the touching comedy of human relationships.
I am interested in families because there is something disarmingly human in the endurance of love between people who so often fail each other, envy each other, make each other miserable.
I am interested in money as a potent character solvent.
I am interested in desire, shame, contradictions, and the imaginative justifications we build around the things we do. I think we spend too much time trying to decide what people are when, in fact, most people are several things at once.
I like stories with beautiful worlds and something rotting underneath. I like people who are difficult to place. I like morality most at the point where it becomes inconvenient. And I like beauty, but I wonder what it makes us overlook.
Over the years, writing became less a hobby than a method. It was how I arranged what I'd learned beside what I still could not explain. In time, I began depending on it for a certain interior order. Things that seemed chaotic in life acquired shape on the page.
The writers I return to most are George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Iris Murdoch, and Dostoevsky. They are interested in people without being sentimental about them. They allow vanity, beauty, cruelty, humor, and self-deception to occupy the same room.
Latin American writers enlarged my imagination—the sense of what a story could hold. English and American writers taught me restraint. Over time, my taste in prose has become cleaner. I like sharp sentences. I like form. As with fashion, I think the more garments you need, the less style you have.
It took me years to understand that writing was less a matter of adding than of recognising what the sentence could survive without. In similar ways, I have spent years learning to remove things. At first I resisted it. Eventually, I became very good at it. I began in this business thinking that depth came from accumulation. In the end, the harder education was learning what to leave out, what to leave behind, and—when all is said and done—how to make an art of what remains.
