Emily Gould talks with the veteran short-story writer about adolescence, the romance genre, and her sprawling, fantastical new work ‘The Book of Love.’
Kelly Link is an anomaly: She’s a world-famous, best-selling author who for almost 20 years never published a single novel. Instead, it’s her five books of short stories that have won her acclaim and fans — not to mention a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer. She is also an owner, since 2019, of Book Moon bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Now, finally, she is a novelist.
My husband and I ran a small press for a couple of decades. I had the enormous privilege of working with a bunch of writers on novels. I also, in my writing life, have a group of friends that I meet with, sometimes on a daily basis, and they are all novelists. We spend a lot of our time talking about the possibilities that novels present to a writer. And I love their books. I get to read them when they’re working on them.
All readers at some point in their lives went through adolescence and they were miserable and they had moments of joy and everything felt supercharged. And so I like the idea that sometimes part of the reading experience is reconnecting with that adolescent version of you. And for a reader, it’s one of the parts of yourself that you’re reconnecting with. It’s the way that certain kinds of books made you feel.
If you’re writing a book and there’s some fantastic elements to it, you have to juggle a bunch of things. You have to, one, think, Well, is there a structure that I want or are there some constraints that would make it interesting to try and make the story work within them?All right, what’s the really fun stuff and the maximalist excessive things that I can do given the set of constraints that I’ve picked, whatever they are?
But right now, I’m not writing much, because I’m teaching. The bookstore is a lot of work at the moment. But I am thinking what I need now is at least a couple of weeks so I can finish a new book and maybe make a start on the next one. What I really love is to have a week to a month in which all I am doing is writing. I’m not cooking, I’m not cleaning, I’m not feeding my chickens. I can really just focus on writing and also on reading.
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