Interviews | September 01, 1992

This interview is not currently available online.

This interview was conducted in cooperation with the American Audio Prose Library on November 6, 1991.

It doesn’t work to just say what happened. Even though the thing that happened presumably is this huge thrilling terrifying thing, you have to be mindful of the point where it stops being your story and becomes the story’ story. If you’re intent on holding it to the facts, you will miss that point. I recently contributed an essay to a book in which twenty-some fiction writers and critics were asked to write about a movie that had changed their lives. In this essay we were instructed to be very personal, so for the first time I wrote about things I’d written about in my short stories as true autobiography: this is what happened. I found it really unnerving and not as interesting as the bits that had formed composites in the stories.