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Because my emotional state has been so parabolic during this shelter-in-place period, I find that my work really saves me. I tend to retreat from my personal relationships the more upset that I get. I don’t know how to explain that I’m feeling sad. I don’t necessarily feel entitled to say that I’m sad or upset and I can’t always pinpoint why. So I tend to just work more. I find that in my work, I really feel safe. I think initially I was really distracted. I couldn’t work at all in the first month. All I could do was hang onto every word of Andrew Cuomo.
For me, fiction has always been the place where I find order and peace. Especially order. I’m such an anxious person that it takes all of my effort to not seem so anxious. Writing fiction gives me an enormous sense of control.
I’m a writer. I take this blank page and turn nothing into something. And I always think, “Can I do that again? Can I keep turning nothing into something?” And I realized that the material is actually all around us. It’s kind of like yeast particles. I just have to pull it in and then I can bake bread.
I think it is incumbent on us to make art. I don’t think it’s a luxury. I think we need it like we need water. I certainly do, and I think other people feel this way. Art has become a very expansive definition of what falls into that category.
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I’m a very political person. I like it. It’s what keeps me on the straight and narrow. That said, I don’t think most people want to read politics in a straight form. So I’m constantly thinking, “What’s my good-looking Trojan horse?” And my good-looking Trojan horse will come along and convey this message that I want to say.
There are people who say, “As a novelist, I write based on emotion or image.” I write very much on the notion that I have something to say. This is what I really want you to listen to, and how do I get you to hang out with me for 14 to 16 hours? That’s not an easy thing! If I really think about the novels I read that are 500-600 pages long that I actually stay with, I always feel a sense of completion. I always think: I really wanted to listen to her. I really wanted to listen to him. I wanted to be in a world where they have that sense of order.
And I think because right now I feel so much disorder that I want to create order; and that I probably feel more disorder now than I have at any other point in my life.
Excerpted from a May 14, 2020, Asia Society virtual conversation.