Max Sebald’s Writing Tips

Sarah Marty-Schlipf – “The Stone of Help”

Catherine Bennett – “Sharon Olds’s silence is golden in an era of endless media exposure”

Bennett mentions Rachel Cusk as a counterpoint, which led me to this 2009 interview:

Lynn Barber – Rachel Cusk: A fine contempt

“…probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel. When I started writing books, my parents found that very difficult because writing was equivalent to emotion in their minds.”

Her early novels, she believes, were inhibited by “having my parents sitting on my shoulder, judging everything, and me trying to conceal what I was doing”.

Cusk then goes on to say that (because of her writing) she’s now basically estranged from her family. So there’s that.

Aside: I didn’t know Rachel Cusk was Canadian-by-birth:

[I]t’s because of my peripatetic childhood, I guess. I was born in Canada, but was still a baby when we moved to America and we moved twice in America, then came back to England and moved a few times.

I quite like the phrase “peripatetic childhood.” I think I shall have to steal that.