The Woman in the Library

by Sulari Gentill

I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim. There is no framework, just bricks interlocked to support each other into a story. I have no idea what I’m actually building, or if it will stand. Perhaps I should be working on a bus. That would be more consistent with my process such as it is. I’m not totally without direction…there is a route of some sort, but who hops on and who gets off is determined by a balance of habit and timing and random chance. There’s always the possibility that the route will be altered at the last minute for weather or accident, some parade or marathon. There’s no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic, unplotted bustle of human life.

Words are put down in solitude; there is a strange privacy to those disclosures. Time to get used to the revelation before readers are necessarily taken into your confidence.

Disappointment is the most caustic emotion.

“Abel Manners!” Whit roars laughing, choking on a donut as he does so. “God, that’s wicked awful! You sound like a courteous porn star!”

His laugh is deep and kind of round.

No…a story is about leading a reader to meaning. The revelation is theirs, but we show them the way. I suppose the morality of the writer influences whether you can trust what they are showing you.”

“A scream is the most human and primal of things, a siren call which binds all those in hearing to help, as it did us to each other and to Caroline.”

When things get stuck, change the scene.

I’m not sure about anything except that certainty is overrated.

The first book is something of a literary tantrum.

There’s comfort in the banality of the conversation. Like the ticking of a clock, metered and unchanged by the mayhem into which it sounds.

But I’m a writer. I mistrust coincidence as an explanation for anything,”