Duh!

“Literature is hands down the sharpest tool in the shed for conveying the feeling of being lost in one’s own skin, one’s own life. Nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, amnesia: literature allows us to regard characters in the midst of these conditions from the inside and the outside. What was once familiar is now inaccessible, bizarre, even terrifying. Lydia Millet has prowled these corridors in all eight of her remarkable books, seven novels and a short story collection. Not only does she describe disorientation fully, she locates it squarely in modern American life as captured by David Byrne’s lyric: ‘This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.’”

“I ran into a lady in the supermarket in Florida. Old lady. There’re lot of old people in Florida; it’s like the law. I was coming up the house wares aisle and she said, “I know who you are, you’re that writer, you write those horror stories,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I guess,” and she said, “I don’t read that kind of thing. I respect what you do but I don’t read those. I like uplifting things like that ‘Shawshank Redemption.’” I said, “I wrote that one, too,” and she goes, “No, you didn’t,” and she just went on her way.”

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect, and it is these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions she wasn’t all she should be. I love her, and that’s the beginning of everything.”