“I’d always felt frustrated by books that made things simpler than I’d found them to be. Even writing English papers as a college student, you’re supposed to sound like you know what you’re talking about. But so often I didn’t–I didn’t even know what I meant. But I knew that. So I began to explore language that expressed the groping way I thought, mixing uncertainty and mistakes with bursts of insight. I found that this was the way to just sound human.” Continue reading
Tag Archives: Margaret Drabble
Messing Up the Drawing Room: Wharton, Olsen, and the Quest for Validation
by Jessica Levine
In retrospect, I see the nine years I spent working on my Ph.D. as a similar kind of detour, a quest for a lineage that might give me a right to speak. Continue reading
Jane Gardam’s Characters: Organically Grown
by Lisa Peet
Even more than the cracks in the façade of England’s nationalism, Gardam is fascinated by the ways its people construct personal walls—which are also prone to crumbling at inopportune moments. Continue reading