![]() At the kitchen table, Sontag took a lead pencil and cut through my drafts with scissor-like slashes. Her apartment was so sparsely furnished it was almost bare, the halls lined with bookshelves, and only a few portrait photos of classic authors and celebrities on the white walls. Sontag and I sat at a long wooden country table, on matching wood benches. All beckoned me toward a timeless flow of stories and novels which had, in their psychic hikes, re-sculpted the mountain climb that is called narrative, re-inventing traditional arcs, heightening the potency of language, and demonstrating that a “story” could be a complex weave generated from a character’s unconscious motives.īut it was before I read these works, as far back as 1976, when Susan Sontag invited me to share a tin of Italian sugar cookies and drink espresso in her penthouse kitchen that the real beginning of these leanings and literary feelings started in me. ![]() My shelves became populated with two Nobel Prize winners, quite a few 20th Century modernists, and a host of writers from the fifties and sixties, mostly forgotten now. As part of surviving the long, lonely hours of writing a novel about madness that I was certain would continue to be rejected by publishers, I found solace, company, and some stubborn shared mission in the fiction about madness before this era, and in some newly translated writers. ![]()
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