Melissa Scholes Young sits down with Jennine Capó Crucet again, this time to discuss the author’s debut novel, as well as the role humor plays in fiction, finding your material, and being asked the “Where Are You From From?” question.
“Growing up in Montgomery, I heard stories about the Civil Rights Movement from people who never became famous. That experience had an impact on my storytelling.”
Percy has turned himself into a cross-medium, cross-genre success whose unabashed embrace of work outside the narrow confines of literary fiction is opening up new opportunities and allowing him to have a hell of a good time.
“I think for a work to really ascend, there has to me something magical in the creation of it. It’s the difference between the art and the craft. The craft we can teach…The art is the stuff that only comes from inside the heart and the soul of the creator.”
“Is there ever enough solitude? I think I’ve always been alert to the competing tugs between togetherness and separateness, especially with regard to family life.”
“No relationship is entirely transparent. More important, our understandings of relationships evolve and shift—knowledge dawns on us, bit by bit with new information, context, and different points of view. How two bodies interact in unseeable places and ways can tell an entire story, whether particular…or universal.”
“Every character in this book works,” writes Ellen Prentiss Campbell in her review of this new book. “Among the greatest pleasures of reading this novel is Freud’s detailed and well-integrated research into the truly labor-intensive life of a seaside village in 1914.”
“All the pieces finally came together for me when I figured out what was at the heart of the novel: why Anna could see her son’s imaginary friends and what the significance of that was, both in terms of plot and theme.”
Chloe Benjamin speaks with her mentor and friend Judith Claire Mitchell about A Reunion of Ghosts, which took ten years to write. Mitchell says of the process, “When students are struggling with their own novels, I do understand what they’re going through and I think I’m often able to give them perspective on the nature of this massive, unwieldy, impossible enterprise that keeps them from giving up.”
“In The Universe of Click it’s more important to have someone saying ‘I loved it!’ than ‘The notion intrigued me, but I was unmoved by the pleonastic ramblings on page 94.’ A review is somehow less decisive than the perception that someone has liked something and passed it on to friends and acquaintances on Limped-In, Face-Schmuck, Mumbler, and Fritter…”
