When I had the pleasure of interviewing Valerie Martin, she spoke of her remarkable novel Mary Reilly, which retells the story of Dr. I love to be taken up by voices unlike those of anyone I know.įor readers as well as writers, the source of these voices can be mysterious. And that is just what I did.” I don’t crave the powdered wig or crinoline, but the vanishing part? Yes. Novelist Alexander Chee explains here why he wrote a historical novel: “I longed to dissolve into someone else, to put on a powdered wig, a crinoline, and vanish into the past. I yearn for depth and subtle understandings and find them often in my favorite fiction. I love to sink into a story as into a bath. The fiction I loved became a part of me in part because I’d been its instrument. Margaret Atwood, in her essay collection Negotiating with the Dead, writes that the reader brings alive the story-what she calls the “score for voice”-by reading it. I held those powerful stories and their authors in high esteem. Through reading, my heart filled and expanded. These precious books introduced me to the lives and struggles of all sorts of people in America and around the world. My heart has been shaped by novels as much as by circumstance.Īs a child, thanks to my mother, schoolteachers, and our school and town libraries, I read vast amounts of fiction and nonfiction.
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