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Is it possible to be a good writer without being a good reader? I think the two are connected motivationally. Reading good writing makes a reader want to write well. I once received a student evaluation that said, “I used to read trash, now, thanks to you, I can’t enjoy it at all.” This was one of the finest compliments I’ve ever received. According to a report of the Independent Book Publishing Association, over five million American adults belong to reading groups. What, do you believe, is the basis for this country's love for literature and books? Let’s get that number up to ten million and I’ll start wondering about the country’s love of literature. Have you ever belonged to a reading group? I’ve spent many years teaching both literature and writing, so I think, in a way, I’ve been so lucky that I’ve actually been paid to be in a lively, continually changing and evolving lifelong reading group. What advice do you have for reading group members when it comes to selecting books for discussion? I hate to say this, but consider dead writers. What books are you reading now or do you plan to read? I’m really looking forward to J. M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, which was excerpted in this month’s New York Review of Books. For my own work, a novel about two actors in New York in the ’70s, I’m reading Stanislavski’s classic An Actor Prepares. If you were stuck on a deserted island and could only bring one book with you to read, what would it be and why? If I had any sense I’d probably choose a book about how to survive on a deserted island: how to prepare seaweed, how to construct a house from palm leaves, how to make wine from coconut milk. Not having any sense, I’d probably choose the complete works of Shakespeare, and try to smuggle in Chekhov’s collected stories when no one was looking. Favorite book when you were a child? Those dreadful Grimm’s fairy tales. If you have children, is this the same book you read to them? If not, what is your favorite book for your children? My daughter had no interest in these stories. We read all the Little House books, and I wished I’d read them instead of those sadistic fairy tales when I was her age. I might have been a very different person. Favorite heroine in literature and why? I’ll pick two: Tess D’Urberville in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for her innocence, and Undine Spragg, in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, for her insatiable avarice. Favorite hero in literature and why? Edwin Reardon, the doomed writer in George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Reardon is a moderately successful novelist who contracts a case of writer’s block that is so severe it kills him. Favorite first line from a book? “Mother died today.” The Stranger by Albert Camus in the translation by Stuart Gilbert. Favorite last line from a book? “It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.” The Bostonians by Henry James. “These” refers to the tears of Verena Tallent, the charismatic feminist who is about to marry Basil Ransom, a southerner who believes that a woman’s place is behind her man. Book that changed your life? Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Words to live by? “Style is an absolute way of seeing.” Gustave Flaubert
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