Siri Hustvedt
Author
of What
I Loved talks with Robert Birnbaum
Siri Hustvedt was born and raised in Minnesota,
and her work has been published in The Paris Review and
Fiction, The Best American Short Stories 1990
and 1991. She is also the author of a book of poetry and three novels,
The Blind Fold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and
most recently, What I Loved. Siri Hustvedt lives in Brooklyn,
NY with her husband and teenage daughter and is more or less working
on her next novel.
What I Loved is the story, as narrated by art historian
Leo Herzberg, of two men—Leo and his close friend artist Bill
Wechsler—over a twenty-five-year span in the hothouse of the
New York art world. Their marriages, their wives, their children's
fates, the tragedies they face are vividly and poignantly presented
against a parade of ideas and themes on social interaction, eroticism,
hysteria and personal identity. At the root of this novel is Hustvedt's
oft-stated fascination with "why do we become who we are?"
Robert Birnbaum: I've not read reviews of What
I Loved, how do reviewers deal with the one "sudden and
incapacitating tragedy" that occurs in this novel?
Siri Hustvedt: Most people have been very moved
by that section of the book.
RB: Do they reveal what that tragedy is?
SH: Some have. You know, this book has been reviewed
all over the place. So I don't remember everything. It came out
in England, in France and Germany. Some reviewers have revealed
the story—I always wish that they wouldn't. Many people have
been very moved by the book—that moment where everything changes.
RB: I felt like I was punched in the face. It
opens the second part of the book?
SH: Yes, it's the beginning of the second part.
RB: I considered whether there should be a parental
warning sticker on the book.
SH: Actually, there were some at the American
publisher, Henry Holt, who said the book should have a warning on
the outside. Because many people have cried as well. I know in England
that people came up to me and told me where they were when they
cried. And that had a strange effect on me because I think it's
the only time in one's life that you are happy that people cried.
RB: You conveyed what you meant to…
SH: …to convey, yeah.
RB: How was it to write this book?
SH: I have to say that I found that part of the
book almost unbearable to write. And you have to imagine it very
fully, and when you do imagine something so sad and nonsensical
very fully, you suffer. It was hard for me to rewrite that section
of that book. It was actually hard for me to go back and look at
it.
RB: I remember a few years ago starting to read
Stephen Dixon's Interstate, which I couldn't get very far
into, and then I did read John Burnham Schwartz's book, Reservation
Road—I don't know how. Do you know those books?
SH: I know both. The Schwartz book I've read.
RB: I wonder if there is a bibliography of books
that deal with this subject?
SH: Well, it probably goes way back. When you
think about loss, it is part of life, and I think it is certainly
part of literature as well. I think nevertheless, there are different
ways of treating the material. And for me it was very important
that when the reader finished the book he or she not be depressed.
I don't find it a truly depressing book. The reason is that the
narrator, Leo Hertzberg, holds on to the ability to love people,
despite what happens to him. Actually, speaking of reviewers, someone
in the Washington Post Book World said that at the end
of the book the sadness felt like almost a kind of triumph for it,
that it was liberating. That's what I wanted.
RB: That would be a mature view. That is, it requires
some experience. I wonder what younger readers would think.
I
know in England that people came up to me and told me where
they were when they cried. And that had a strange effect on
me because I think it's the only time in one's life that you
are happy that people cried. |
SH: I've often thought that it would have been
impossible for me to write this book as a young person. My first
two books are in a way initiation books about very young women.
I believe a certain maturity was necessary to write it. I am not
sure that maturity is necessary to read it. I can think of one notable
example of a very young girl in France who came up to me after a
reading and said she didn't have children, she was nineteen years
old and she loved the book, it meant a lot to her. She said she
almost wondered, why (laughs). I suppose it depends on who you are.
RB: I am thinking about your book in the context
of the books one was required to read as a high school and early
college student. Those classics that, for me, meant very little
against my own life experiences.
SH: I was somewhat different, in that way. I had
great reading experiences as a very young person. At eleven, my
mother gave me Emily Dickinson's poems and [William] Blake and I
loved those poems. I didn't understand what the poets were saying,
certainly not in every line. And there were some poems I didn't
understand at all. But I read the poems over and over and over to
myself, and I had an experience of awe. I loved those poems. And
then when I was thirteen, again my mother—who was a very big
reader and a big reader of English novels—gave me David
Copperfield, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
At the same time I read lesser works like Hawaii by James
Michener and Gone with the Wind. But those books had a
huge effect on me. I ended up writing my dissertation on Charles
Dickens.
RB: So I guess you didn't watch much television?
SH: We had rationed television in my house.
RB: You grew up in the Midwest?
SH: In Minnesota.
RB: That's called the Midwest?
SH: It certainly is. It's the upper Midwest, exactly.
RB: So you studied literature?
SH: Yup. I got a Ph.D. at Columbia in 1986.
RB: When did you think you wanted to be a writer?
SH: I wanted to be a writer when I was fourteen.
It was after I had been reading those English novels that I—I
actually announced it in the local newspaper. You have to understand
that I grew up in a town of ten thousand people. And there was a
little column in the paper called "Teen of the Week."
It was sponsored by a local clothing store and there was a big picture
of me and they did an interview and I announced, not that I was
going to be a writer but very pretentiously, that I was going to
be an author (laughs). Very silly. I did have that ambition. And
I wrote poems constantly all through high school.
RB: To fulfill that ambition what did you do?
SH: Well, I wrote. I didn't publish anything until
I was twenty three. By that time I was in graduate school in New
York. And I had an amazing bit of early good luck. The first poem
I ever sent out anywhere was to the Paris Review and they
took it.
RB: Wow!
SH: But then I had rejections after that. It was
the first time I thought to myself, "This is good. This is
something I am proud of." And I am still proud of that poem.
It was the right thing to do, but I held off for years for years
of writing really abysmal poetry (laughs).
RB: Do you still write poetry?
SH: No, but what happened to me was during the
course of writing this book of poetry I got stuck. One of the reasons
I got stuck was I read a lot of poetry and it was so great. And
when I wrote something on the page it just seemed bad. And so I
got constipated and I had a friend who was a teacher and a poet,
David Shapiro, who taught at Columbia then. And I asked him, "David,
I don't know what to do, I can't squeak out anything." And
he said, "When I have that problem I do automatic writing like
the Surrealists. It doesn't matter what you say, just sit down and
let it roll." And I did that and I wrote thirty pages in a
single night. And then I spent the next three months editing those
pages down to ten, and that was the first prose work I had ever
done. It was a prose poem. It was not a real narrative. But there
were narrative elements to it. And I never wrote anything in line
after that.
RB: I read in a Publisher's Weekly Q
and A that after your second novel you intended to write your next
book with a male protagonist.
 SH:
I did.
RB: A curious choice of a character, a son of—do
we consider Leo's parents Holocaust survivors?
SH: Well, I don't call them survivors. I think
of people who were actually in the camps. His parents fled the Nazis.
And that's how I think of that family. But he lost his grandmother
and uncle and aunt and twin cousins. They all died in Auschwitz
in the book.
RB: You have chosen an elderly…
SH: Jewish guy…
RB: Who is an art historian. I don't want to fall
into the cliched line where I say, "You are a young woman,
why are you writing as an elderly Jewish art historian?" But
nonetheless you made some choices here. What was the starting point?
The story, the character?
SH: This book has a very peculiar beginning. And
a lot of my work does start in a very irrational way. I knew I was
going to write it as a man. That was a technical difficulty that
I decided on very consciously. What I didn't know was what the story
was going to be about. I had this insistent mental image in my mind
of a very fat lady lying on a bed in a room dead, a corpse. I don't
know why or what this corpse was, but it kept coming back to me.
I originally thought that perhaps my male narrator would open a
door and find her and that would begin the story. But that took
me nowhere (laughs).
RB: That doesn't show up in this book at all.
SH: Yes it does. In the painting. In the growing
and shrinking of those initial paintings. That's how I ended up
using her. But I honestly think that the themes of starving and
eating and some of the themes of grief were initiated by that first
image. So it started in a very irrational way and I'm not, of course,
an entirely irrational writer, and I don't mean to propose that.
At the same time it developed very slowly over the course of six
years. A lot of the thematic material, the repetitive thematic material
comes from places I am not entirely aware of. And then I realized
when I was editing the book, finally, that the way I edited the
book was when there were sections that did not reverberate or mirror
other parts of the book I cut them. So it does function almost like
an echo chamber.
RB: Some writers who don't live in New York will
talk about how they think there is an inclination in the publishing
world that leans toward a certain kind of book and they call it
a New York book.
SH: Um huh.
RB: Most of this book takes place in Manhattan,
in the art and academic world. What could be more New York? Do you
see this as a New York book?
SH: Yeah, it is a New York book. And the setting
is New York. The time period corresponds almost exactly to the time
I have lived in New York. I arrived in New York in 1978 and this
story begins in '75. So I fudged a few years of not actually having
experienced that time. But the rest corresponds to my life in New
York. When I took it on I wanted to address that subculture but
also the culture at large in some way. Earlier you asked about Leo
being this old Jew. I didn't want to have someone who was born in
New York, and I wanted to have someone born outside the country
because he does have the position of an observer in the book. He
is a kind of exile, Leo. That was very important to the tone of
the narration.
RB: He is not a religious Jew.
SH: He is a completely secular Jew and it is explained
early on that his parents were also assimilated secular Jews…
RB: Who didn't want to leave Germany…
SH: Well, his uncle doesn't leave. I read a lot
about those families and it's funny how you enter that world. I
also have a Norwegian mother who lived through the Nazi occupation
in Norway. I have always felt fairly close to a European sensibility
because of that.
RB: That was something of a digression because
I was thinking about the New York book issue because it is occasionally
offered as a complaint that the publishing world is stacked against
non-New York writers—that editors and reviewers are more disposed
to look with interest on this kind of a story because it is one
that they have some knowledge of.
SH: Well, it's possible. I have had both experiences.
My second novel was The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, which
was about a young woman in a tiny town. A fictional version of my
hometown in Minnesota. That book got a lot of attention in the Midwest
because it was a book set in a world that people knew there and
I think maybe less attention in New York because it seemed provincial.
Though I have to say that for me that book was a kind of psychic
map. It certainly used the Midwest and used that tiny town, but
it was not a local color story. The other thing is this is my third
novel. I've been around a little bit now. You think about, for example,
Southern writers, how important they have been to American literature.
A lot of those books have been set in very specific small places,
I am not sure it's true.
RB: It seems to me that Southern writers are still
ghettoized and that only recently being called a Southern writer
outside the South is not a term of disrespect. Other than William
Faulkner…
…
one of the great parts of being an American writer is that
so much is going on here. It is exciting to the rest of the
world too. When I am in Europe people are quite excited about
American fiction and there is a sense that American writers
are doing all kinds of different things—which they are. |
SH: (laughs) Eudora Welty has a very big reputation.
America is a big place and it takes in a lot and one of the great
parts of being an American writer is that so much is going on here.
It is exciting to the rest of the world too. When I am in Europe
people are quite excited about American fiction and there is a sense
that American writers are doing all kinds of different things—which
they are. There is a plethora of different styles.
RB: Could it be that Europeans are more tuned
in to American literature and trends than Americans are?
SH: Well certainly some Europeans, that's true.
There is a very avid group of readers. It's not always the same.
It's interesting about books that travel and books that don't travel.
Sometimes books can do very well in the United States and not elsewhere.
They're the mysteries both of publishing and of what speaks to people
in one culture and might not speak to people in another.
RB: Here in the US we seem not pay attention to
world literature.
SH: Yes, this is one great problem in the United
States, that we do not import enough foreign writers. And when the
Nobel Prize rolls around America is often embarrassed by not knowing
who the writer is. Whereas in the rest of the world, these writers
are very well known and read. One thing that American publishing
needs to be taken to task for is not importing more writers from
abroad.
RB: I recently read in a Toronto newspaper that
there was a correlation between fewer books being reviewed and book
sales.
SH: Fewer books are being reviewed. That's absolutely
true. The book world is shrinking to some degree. In the United
States there are fewer forums for reviewing books. Book pages are
smaller. But maybe the Internet is compensating for all that. I
do think that is a somewhat free-floating forum for commentary.
RB: I think you will be pleased and amazed when
you see what is on the Internet.
SH: When you ride the subway in New York you do
realize that people read. I am one of those subway riders who is
leaning to one side and leaning to the other to find out what people
are reading. And people read everything. From self-help business
books to Charlette Bronte. Everything. I find that quite moving.
RB: Isn't it strange how it translates into commerce.
For instance, besides Brian Lamb there is no regular television
presence of literary fiction.
SH: When I was on tour in Germany, I did prime
time German television. Now think about that. Eight o'clock in the
evening, you are the main person on a television show.
RB: (laughs)
SH: Mostly, it was culture in general. Not only
books but there are also book TV shows, regularly. And when you
think that the most popular book show in France was Apostrophe
with Bernal Pevot, it was the number one show for a long time. My
husband was on it a couple of times…
RB: Take that, America…
SH: No, I am just saying .
RB: I am not making fun of you. That's my aside.
SH: It's just there's a different position of
literature, and part of it is that there is a certain strain of
anti-intellectualism in America.
RB: Certain?
SH: …and anti-culture. I am trying to be
diplomatic.
RB: Why are you trying to be diplomatic?
SH: I don't know, Just because I generally am.
That's a partial explanation. I have always thought it was very
interesting that in a country that was founded by intellectuals
that this should be so widespread. And it is. There is an anti-culture,
anti-intellectual presence in the whole ball of wax. That does makes
itself felt.
RB: There are some characters that get away with
being street intellectuals or blue collar philosophers. And they
are celebrated in some odd ways…
SH: That's true.
RB: Studs Terkel has managed to gain acceptance.
I remember there was a longshoreman, Eric Hoeffer.
 SH:
Yes, yes, yes, I think it's because if you cloak yourself in a kind
of populism then it works or can work. You notice, for example,
that the right-wing ideologues in this country now always brandish
a kind of working class …and none of these guys are working-class
guys. They all come out of eastern universities and often from very
wealthy families. But in order to make it stick they pose in a way
as regular guys (laughs).
RB: Those people aren't even ideologues. There
is no coherent thesis being proffered. They seem to be loud-mouth
namecallers offering argument by nomenclature.
SH: In the media—but behind the scenes there
really is ideology at work.
RB: Who are the ideologues? William Kristol?
SH: William Kristol definitely. William Safire
is an ideologue. These are people who are part of the libertarian
right.
RB: Well, Safire is not a namecaller…
SH: No he's not…
RB: He's rather avuncular and unlike most so-called
conservatives in that he has a sense of humor.
SH: Absolutely. I wasn't saying that. We had moved
from name calling to ideology. He is some one who absolutely believes
a pretty elaborately formed, thought-through ideology. It's not
one I share, but that doesn't mean that I don't recognize the intellectual
foundations of it. Anyway, speaking of journalists in this book
there is [the character Henry] Haaseborg.
RB: Intelligent but embittered.
SH: And cruel.
RB: Also nasty.
SH: Yes, but I think that happens. Also the way
Bill's work (William Wechsler, one of the main characters in the
book, is an artist) is treated by journalists in the novel is, it's
noted that European journalists are appreciative of the material.
And that a lot of the Americans are annoyed by the fact that he
seems to be posing as not a regular guy.
RB: And they are compelled to think about his
work.
SH: Right, he is not a sound bite.
RB: There is a good deal of social cultural critique
here.
SH: Yes, there is. (laughs)
RB: Henry Hasseborg reminds me of this list of
50 loathsome New Yorkers that one of those snarky Manhattan magazines
published. So, I thought the text was clever and funny but what
was the point?
SH: There is a lot of spite, and fame creates
spite, and there is a little passage in the book that says that,
"No matter how small that fame may be, whether it's on the
school yard, in the board room or in the culture at large, people
make sport of taking others down." That is an ugliness about
human nature.
RB: It's not about New York?
SH: New York may be worse because it's a bit of
a hot house. Of course, New Yorkers do feel that they live in the
center of the universe.
RB: I wasn't unhappy that the editor of Maxim
was the number one person on the list. Or that Henry Kissinger was
on that list.
SH: (Laughs)
RB: What's it like to be in a two-writer family?
SH: Paul [Auster] and I met twenty-one years ago
and we were both completely unknowns. He was then writing The
Invention of Solitude, the second part. He had finished the
first part when we met. And I was continuing to write poems and
beginning to work on my dissertation. So we've shared his whole
prose career. He had written poems and essays before that. His whole
prose career really corresponds with our marriage. And I suffered
through the 17 rejections that City of Glass got from New
York publishers —a book which, just to brag, is now in 40
languages…
RB: Only seventeen rejections?
This
is one great problem in the United States, that we do not
import enough foreign writers. And when the Nobel Prize rolls
around America is often embarrassed by not knowing who the
writer is. |
SH: Yeah, only seventeen. That's the kind of rejection,
when you have written a book like that you, in your heart—Paul
knew what the book was. I knew what it was after having read it.
That was bitter. And it's fortunate, of course, that that story
reversed itself. But I think people have a tendency to forget that
they suffered. (laughs heartily)
RB: Are you saying that both of you went through
this apprenticeship at the same time?
SH: He is eight years older than I am. So I was
behind him, and I am also a much slower writer. It took me four
years to write each of the first two books. And six to write the
third. Paul has kept up with a steady pace of publishing—
just about every two years. And he is just at the very, very end
of another book.
RB: And he does other things, also.
SH: He's done movies. He's very prolific. But
I think because we in some sense have shared the ups and downs of
literary life together for so many years that it's almost like breathing.
RB: I wasn't thinking of the…
SH: You want the logistics?
RB: If you work off something of the stereotype
that writing is a solitary occupation and that there is not always
a connection to the real world or that your connection ebbs and
flows, when two people occupy that universe in one household, that's
what I wonder about.
SH: We both work every weekday. Sometimes Paul
works on the weekend. And I work from about eight thirty until about
three and then stop and rush out and buy dinner and do yoga. Paul
often takes a break for lunch and he goes back and works until five
or six in the evening. So we are in that strange place of the book
most of the day. I think it helps however because the fact that
we are both doing that is helpful in understanding what a strange
business it is to do it. And I also am very attached to domestic
life and we have a daughter who is fifteen and is still at home
and going to school. I immerse myself very deeply in the practical
aspects of life as well. Usually I forget about the book until I
am going to sleep at night and then I listen to the characters talk
to me. Or just talk in my head. Often those conversations don't
appear in the text.
RB: You are conscious of these conversations?
They aren't dream conversations?
SH: They are conscious—I suppose in some
way what you are doing is manufacturing these dialogues. They don't
(chuckles) feel like that, it's like you are just listening to them.
RB: Do you and Paul read each other?
SH: We do, but it functions in a different way.
Paul reads to me about every two weeks. Aloud. When he has finished
a section he will come and read it to me and ask what I think. I
have to say most of the time I am for it. But it does happen that
I think he has jumped off the deep end. And I don't think there
has ever been a moment when he hasn't taken my advice. With me,
however, it takes me a long time to produce a draft and with this
book he read four different drafts over the course of the six years.
It could be a couple of years between him seeing the book. But then
what he said was very important to me.
RB: How large were these four drafts?
SH: Well (chuckles) it grew and shrank. The penultimate
draft was about a hundred and fifty pages longer than the end novel.
But they also were written over from scratch, on a blank page. It
was the same story, essentially, but I need the momentum of making
new sentences, doing it all over.
RB: You aren't writing on a computer?
SH: I mean that I don't work over it. I just start
on a blank screen. That's the correct term, a blank screen.
RB: How much of your lives are occupied with by
publishing events and activities?
SH: For this book, including the European publishers,
I have been doing interviews since September.
RB: Hmm. That’s over half of a year.
SH: I feel like I have been talking to the press
eternally. But I decided for this book I would just—it's turned
out that I haven't done everything I was asked to do. But I was
going to do a lot and I have done a lot.
RB: So that's for the initial publication. What
about when you are both writing books and living your lives, do
you go to book-publishing parties and whatever?
 SH:
Only for friends and that's at night, so it doesn't interfere with
the work. But we have a number of friends who are writers and we
go to their parties and read their books.
RB: And you have non-writer friends?
SH: Yes, we do. We also have friends who are not
writers (laughs). We do not live in a literary bubble. Plus, I have
three sisters that I am very close to— two that live in New
York. My youngest sister is an architect. The number three sister
is given an acknowledgement at the end of the book. She is the one
who is currently writing a book about hysteria. And my number two
sister lives in Minnesota and she is a businesswoman. So their worlds
are deeply a part of mine.
RB: Could your family leave New York?
SH: Not now. I wouldn't want to leave New York
now. I love New York. Also, after September 11th, in some way, the
romance that I have had with the city for many years was only made
stronger.
RB: Let's talk a little more about What I
Loved. Leo is the main focus, the other three characters of
the two couples and the children are also well developed and are
quite complicated. This a large ensemble. Actually, the three women
are very complicated.
SH: Yeah, they are all pretty complicated and
I think, for me as it took a long to write—the characters
did grow. One of the earlier drafts I thought Erica [Leo's wife]
was given short shrift and she developed more over time. It's as
if they are real to me.
RB: How does this novel feel against your first
two?
SH: Well, it's more ambitious. It's a larger book
and takes on bigger seams of ordinary human feeling.
RB: What is that?
SH: In The Blindfold I explore—it
came out of a little experience that I had—I left that experience
with a feeling of the uncanny. And that book tried to treat some
of the ambiguities of that feeling. So it was quite specific. That
is not love, loss, grief. That is some very specific avenue of human
experience that fascinated me. Also power relations in that book
were very important and the experience of being feminine and vulnerable
and the second book was sort of an allegory of psychic life, in
a way, played out in this small town. But again, the mysteries were
not about family, being a parent, being a child. It's broader, bigger
meatier seam, in some way. I chose to take it on. I think there
are writers who develop more quickly than I do. But just wasn't
able to take on that material until I was in my forties.
RB: Is this book all you wanted it to be?
SH: Uh, when I finished the book I thought to
myself, "I've done it." I remember thinking that if Paul
doesn't like it I'm just going to kill myself (laughs). Not really.
But I also felt like lying down on the floor and weeping for four
days. I did not do that, but that's how I felt. Because I really
pressed myself to the limit in the sense that I—in terms of
my own ambitions, I feel that I did do it.
RB: What are reading from on your tour?
SH: I mostly read from the early part of the book.
Although I was in Iowa City at Prairie Lights and I read the Iowa
City part of the book. (laughs) I couldn't resist. The part where
Leo had a moment of Jewish paranoia and he feels like "a gaunt
Jew in a sea of overfed Gentiles." People did not find that
as funny as I find it. Of course, I come from that part of the Midwest.
Iowa and Minnesota are very closely linked.
RB: I come from the Midwest. I know the geography.
SH: (laughs) I live in New York and I am married
to a Jew but I have this double perspective. (laughs)
RB: Prairie Lights— were there lots of writers
at that reading?
SH: I have been very pleased to have a number
of doctors and psychoanalysts and scientists show up at my readings.
This pleases me beyond belief, I have to say. There does seem to
be subsection of my readers who are professional people.
RB: Your acknowledgments indicate your attention
to the scientific literature on some of the issues that are in the
novel.
SH: I was deeply happy to get a beautiful letter
from a cellular biologist in Cambridge, England who was really very
moved by the book and tried to explain a little of what they are
doing there. The questions that the book brings up about why we
become who we are is a question that is asked in a number of fields,
not only philosophers ask this question but certainly a number of
scientists. He mentioned the fact that a lot of this neurological
cellular research is connected to [Martin] Charcot discoveries of
a long, long time ago. And he was looking for lesions of the brain
that would explain things. And, of course in hysteria there are
no lesions and that jumped started Freud, really. Freud visited
Charcot. This scientist did say that they know a great deal about
organic illnesses but the psychoses remain very mysterious. I found
that out when I did research on personality disorders. It's very
hard to track and it's very hard to find organic reasons for them.
Or for many of them.
RB: Which is why psychopharmacology seems so hit
or miss.
So
we are in that strange place of the book most of the day.
I think it helps, however, because the fact that we are both
doing that is helpful in understanding what a strange business
it is to do it. |
SH: Yes it's a strange business. Often what happens,
as we all know, when people are doing research for something else
or curing someone for something else they realize that medication
clears up their skin or takes away headaches and that they start
using it for that reason. It's not because they have gone way back
to beginning and found the original problem.
RB: So, what's next?
SH: (laughs) I have a title and many thoughts
about a new book called The Sorrows of an American. I am
finally going to treat something that is so very deep to me, which
is immigration.
RB: That's a working title?
SH: I know that's the title.
RB: So in six…
SH: Yeah in six or ten years we may talk again.
(laughs) Paul said,
"This doesn't sound like a small book." I said, "No,
I don't think it is a small book."
RB: Is that the way you start, with a title?
SH: No sometimes it comes to me and other times
I have been working for a couple of years before I know what the
title is. I have a feeling this title is really going to stick.
I am also finishing a book of essays on painting. So I do other
writing as well, a collection of essays on different painters. I
am finishing an essay on Goya..
RB: Goya figures in this What I Loved.
SH: Yea.
RB: Well, thank you very much.
SH: Thank you for having me.
RB: My pleasure.
____
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Posted:
May 6, 2003
