Photo Credit: Richard Saker/The Guardian
From a Guardian article by Kate Kellaway, here’s some stuff to think about:
Finding form as a writer, she argues, has always been her most important task – it took two years to hit upon Outline‘s outline. The writing itself is secondary. For a writer of eloquent precision, it is interesting to hear her shrug off the question of style. She sees style as inescapable from self, allied to it: “Just as a person, don’t you sometimes get sick of being yourself and want to be the thing you aren’t? But you are the thing you are – to me, that is style. It is relatively bonded to self and there is not a lot you can do about it. Form is different.” She cannot be found in the new novel, she says, yet she is there. She believes Outline‘s “annihilated perspective” might be the “beginning of something interesting” (she is already working on a sequel). And now she makes another astonishing assertion: “I’m certain autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts. Description, character – these are dead or dying in reality as well as in art.” Is she right? I’m not sure. Even on literary turf, she is effortlessly provocative
