Category: Interviews
Salon Interview
I've been interviewed by Armchair Shotgun, Three Guys and One Book, and now Salon. Naturally each took a slightly different angle, but two of them focused on the critique of the news business woven through The Room and the Chair. In all three interviews, I get carried away when the questions turn to the newspaper world. After I see the interview I'm quasi-ashamed. (And in two of the interviews, the interviewer and I decided to take out some of my more choice vitriol. But not all of it.)
The ambivalence comes because there are journalists out there I not only respect, but revere. Katherine Boo of The New Yorker, Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Susan Glasser of Foreign Policy, Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic to name but a few. All women--yes, but perhaps that's because it's even harder to be a woman in the business and stay fierce. But almost all of the men I've admired have made some uneasy compromises--maybe because they're the breadwinners in their families, or because they got a wee bit drunk with the moonshine of some little stretch of power. Yet even that mad generalization has exceptions. Don Graham, for one, was one of the greatest publishers alive. And Alex Star, now an editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine, as well as Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, are two of my intellectual heroes. Yet I'd argue they're editors, and Leon's essays are more akin to Emerson than Thomas Friedman.
Another thing I do know is that when I was writing R&C, I had empathy for every one of the newspaper characters. I think this is because my imaginative self, certainly in contrast with my conversational self, is more giving.
Armchair Shotgun
I was a writer-in-residence at Eugene Lang College at The New School for three years and I had great students. I've stayed in touch with a number of them. One, Kevin Dugan, started a literary journal with a great title--Armchair Shotgun. The first issue, in January this year, featured an interview with Jonathan Lethem. This month, Kevin interviewed me. We sat at the bar at French Roast drinking ice water about a block away from Lang's classrooms. You can read the full text here.
February 10, 2010 Interview with Three Guys One Book
I write about guys. My first novel's protagonist is a guy named Aziz. He has a bunch of guy friends. So when Dennis Haritou one of the men who run the literary blog Three Guys and a Book told me he was "going ape shit" about The Room and the Chair a few weeks ago, I was a happy girl. He then proceeded to send me a list of questions about the book that were smart, smart, smart. I answer them here.
“Turning Secret Intelligence into Fiction” - Interview in The Wall Street Journal
This interview appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal:
The Wall Street Journal: When did you start writing fiction, and why?
Lorraine Adams: I had been covering international terrorism. I had done some stories on the 2000/1999 millennial bombing plot, and was asked to do an anatomy of a counter terrorism investigation. I got to know a lot of Algerian refugees and stowaways. As I tried to fashion an investigative piece about them, I found the investigative stories were less interesting than the stories they were telling me about their lives… I felt like there were so many conventional, formulaic ideas about who would do these things… Before I knew it, I was writing a novel.
WSJ: The plot of "The Room and the Chair" is incredibly intricate and jumps all over the place geographically. How did you come up with it, and did you map it out in detail before you started writing?
Ms. Adams: I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal