One of my incentives for writing Marie's story was that I noticed novels dedicated solely to a single woman's voice are few and far between in the "literary" world of late. Of course, a wiser writer would take that as a clue NOT to dedicated an entire book to an "ordinary" woman from middle class Brookly and L.I. - but I'm a contrarian.
I don't have personal experience with blindness, but my hope is that the metaphor works on many levels -- I guess that's every writer's hope in some ways. Having decided to give this entire novel over to a single woman, I also wanted to make sure that she didn't become "representative" - that she was uniquely herself -- so having her, literally, see the world in a certain way due to her eyesight was a way to begin to establish that.
And then there are all the other implications: blind faith and blind love . . . the sense of every character here in some way damaged . . . either by experience or by birth . . . the damage in some way confirming that each one is also unique, unlike any other . . .
Good. There is a decision for the careful reader to make here, I think. Does the last chapter describe a miracle -- her son's life restored because she asked -- or an act of salvation - - does she save her brother's life by taking the sleeping pills from his room - or does it describe sheer foolishness, the foolishness of believing in either miracles or in love as redemptive??? I don't set out to tell the reader what to think (I don't work for Fox News), I present the evidence of this single woman's life and ask you to ponder (as I ponder) the question of both the worth of a single life and the meaning of love.
I love Nabokov - his sentences made me want to be a writer way back when I was an English major at Oswego State. I love Yeats, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Millay -- too many poets to name. I love Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Garcia Marquez. Since today is "Bloomsday," I have to throw in Joyce, too. And William Trevor, Alice Munro, Louise Erdrich, etc, etc,
Alice, one of the things I love in your fiction is the voices of your characters and the expressions that they use. I'm thinking of the ladies upstairs discussing the deceased with Fagin's mother, for example. They make a novel like "Someone" so vivid. How do you capture those voices?
One of my incentives for writing Marie's story was that I noticed novels dedicated solely to a single woman's voice are few and far between in the "literary" world of late. Of course, a wiser writer would take that as a clue NOT to dedicated an entire book to an "ordinary" woman from middle class Brookly and L.I. - but I'm a contrarian.
Alice, one of the things I love in your fiction is the voices of your characters and the expressions that they use. I'm thinking of the ladies upstairs discussing the deceased with Fagin's mother, for example. They make a novel like "Someone" so vivid. How do you capture those voices?