In Fragments Of A Marriage, Familiar Themes Get Experimental
... I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality. I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
On what draws her to characters who are unhinged or unstable
I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling. And that's always something that you want in a novel.
On whether she was apprehensive about writing about tropes like love and parenthood
I felt incredible trepidation about writing about motherhood and marriage. I was particularly not interested in writing a book that had an affair in it, because I thought that we've all read that a million times. But at a certain point, I realized that I wanted the book to kind of break apart in the middle — to have a before and an after. And I realized that if you defamiliarize things enough, you really can write about anything.
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