Although I admired Dostoevsky more than Tolstoy, my first story writing impulses came after reading Tolstoy novellas.
More than anything that's been the thread through my life – the desire to write, the impulse to write.
In Melville's "Billy Budd," for example, she argued that Billy's accuser, the evil John Claggart, is a homosexual "presented as different in his essential nature than the normal men around him". "At the same time," she writes, "every impulse of every person in this book that could at all be called desire could be called homosexual desire".
It was really a record written on impulse and a lot of first tries.
The tics occupy the same place in me as other obsessive practices in my life, like writing, a daily impulse I haven't been able to shake off for longer than the oldest of my noises.
She also went off and made films — a displacement, I believe, of the fiction-writing impulse.
But the literary intricacy of this novel is what gives it its deep-shelved complexity and makes it a lovely essay on the fiction-writing impulse.
Are you suggesting that the impulse to write begins with the impulse to cover up the truth?
In I Am the Future Boy, a roving, insightful piece about intergenerational tensions, his thread inevitably leads to the act of writing, the impulse of the artist to reveal himself whatever the personal cost – to himself or, less heroically, those around him.
