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