Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.
Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.
We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.
At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath?
Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch.
When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it.
We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.
You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do.
Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life.
I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.
My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.
If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it.
The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.
My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.
If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.
I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.
We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person.
