Elizabeth Graver's Blog - Posts Tagged "self"
New York Times Review
The End of the Point received a lovely, smart, perceptive New York Times review by Alida Becker today. It's an amazing feeling to work so long and so hard and in such a private, largely solitary way on a book--this one took me over seven years to write--and then to send it off into the world and have it find readers who GET it. For me, this is a very particular sense of being seen, not for your own self--for the writing is not my self, exactly--but for some essential soul-ness that is and is not the self, that is, perhaps, the self combined with the world and the imagination, the book a little piece of architecture born from the long process of coaxing and knocking down, of reworking, dreaming, doubting, trusting and (mostly) returning and returning to try to get it right.
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
