I have no doubt that Lagarce is a cornerstone of contemporary French theatre. It’s been only twenty-eight years since his death, and his plays are already considered classics.
I think a lot about Madame Bovary. Probably more than I should. And I sometimes wonder, what if Flaubert had chosen to make Rodolphe kill himself instead of Emma? Like, what if Freud had focused on Antigone instead of Oedipus?
Kelly Krumrie & Mark Mayer, Part II
Part of why I like writing younger narrators is because they’re closer to what I think we all still feel but hide from ourselves, which is the essential bewilderment of life itself.
Kelly Krumrie & Mark Mayer, Part I
In really kind of spooky ways, this book recognized how dull work of plotting points on a chart or drawing electric circuits ends up changing everything for us.
I have been asking myself this a lot lately, of my past year: What genre am I in? Is this horror? A tragedy? A comedy? All of it?
I envy so much people who are able to edit, destroy, sculpt. Sometimes I worry I explode onto the page, and what may seem like stylistic choices are really just my overeagerness and inability to complete my own thoughts.
As humans . . . we seem destined to look for patterns—which, to me, is another way of saying we’re on the hunt for “explanations.” Life is scary. We need all the help we can get to get through it. Biographical accounts, as often as not, seem to function as cautionary tales.
How might the stories of different characters tangle, or explode on contact, or narrowly miss each other, but create vibrations nonetheless?
I think so much of growing up is just looking at other people who are doing things you wish you could be doing and wondering how they got there. But then of course you have to find your own place in that. And that’s a tricky thing to do.
When we talk about colonialism it seems like it’s something from the past, but it’s not. . . . It is part of our life in a very remarkable way, very present even today.