Lindsay Hunter
Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s. Originally from Florida, she now lives in Chicago with her husband, son, and two pit bulls.
Hunter's first novel is Ugly Girls.
From her Q & A with Juliet Escoria for The Believer:
BLVR: Of all the mistakes you’ve made in life, what do you most hope your son Parker will grow up to repeat?The Page 69 Test: Ugly Girls.
LH: All my life I wanted to be an actress. I wanted it so bad my teeth would ache. Like it was something I could bite into. I wanted to make people feel. When I was twenty I went to The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York to study the method. I had taken time off from college to do it. It was the first time in my life at that point that I dropped everything to focus on this thing I had inside of me saying I should be acting. But at the end of my time there I had come to face the realization that I did not like acting at all, nor was I any good at it. I did a lot of brow-beating, back-lashing, tortured thinking. Why had I come all this way; how could I have not known? What about acting drew me? I realized it was that I wanted to make people feel. I was writing a lot while I was there; I’d been writing all my life, in fact, and I finally decided I’d focus on writing, instead. I could make people feel through writing.
Going to NYC was a mistake in that it cost me a lot of money (and my parents, too), and by the end I was kind of mentally bereft, and I was mugged on the subway, and all in all I had to face that I’d been an idiot. But it was a passion I was pursuing, and I firmly believe that’s kind of what saved me in my teenage years. Believing in a future built around expressing these things inside me. My senior year English teacher wrote in my yearbook, “You’re going to be a great writer one day.” And I bitterly thought, “You mean actress.” The mistake of NYC made me face the truth: that I was...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
