Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014).
From her conversation with Barack Obama as published in The New York Review of Books:
The President: I’m going to shift gears for a second. You told me that when you started writing it just kind of showed up in some ways. When you started writing your novels, that it was just forced upon you and that you didn’t map it out. Tell me about when you were writing Gilead and Home and some of my favorite books, how did you decide, I’m going to start writing about some old pastor in the middle of cornfields?--Marshal Zeringue
Because by that time you had gone to the East Coast, you had traveled in France.
Robinson: The Midwest was still a very new thing for me. I got a voice in my head. It was the funniest thing. I mean, [I’d] been reading history and theology and all these things for a long time. And then I was in Massachusetts, actually, just [waiting to spend] Christmas with my son[s]. They were late coming to wherever we were going to meet, and I was in this hotel with a pen and blank paper, and I started writing from this voice. The first sentence in that book is the first sentence that came to my mind. I have no idea how that happens. I was surprised that I was writing from a male point of view. But there...[read on]
