I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading – a lot. I think I’ll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven’t read, sometimes I feel as if they’re all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, ‘Hurry up.’
I don’t think anything can help me socially, to be honest: I have this terrible personality. I don’t really know how to describe it… maybe I’ll go with surly.
I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don’t deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrative pressure in that book is just amazing. I think you could reread it a few times and actually go out of your mind.
Years ago a friend and fellow writer, Nick Antosca, once made a remark about it being best not to threaten, but to simply act. An effective way of going about things, I think.
Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn’t go in the order we perceive it. There are… repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.
I was a real mess at school. I got a bit of a reputation for being the weird girl: the girl who’d go silent randomly and just kind of write down replies to people’s questions in a book.
I sometimes get asked: ‘How come the men in your stories don’t have such strong characters?’ And I’m like: ‘I don’t care.’ I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It’s not erasure; it’s just they’re not the focus. In real life, they’re quite nice.
I have been in love with Emily Dickinson’s poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, ‘Dear Emily – I hope I have understood.’ Emily’s poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.
I don’t think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It’s more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don’t think I’m made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer.
I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too – be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I’ve decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.
A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn’t quite their thing by saying to me: ‘What about realism?’ To which my general response is, ‘What about it?’ However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked ‘What about the fantastic?’
I take aliens very seriously and don’t appreciate light entertainment or weak approximations being made of them.