COWEN: What is your most unusual successful work habit?
ROBINSON: I think it’s becoming used to the fact that it takes me a long time to get to the place where I can work on something — that all this frustration [laughs] and depression that precedes my writing anything is part of the process of writing.
As someone who’s interested in finding God, I liked letting this religion-themed conversation wash over me. I also liked the idea that creative projects just have to take as long as they take and be as hard as they are. Robinson’s new book is about Genesis — she calls the Bible “the most complex document on the planet” — but in the interview they touch on several non-religious topics, too (like the above). Meanwhile I’m enjoying reading the negative reviews of her book on Amazon, which is probably bad (of me).
Here are a few stories I enjoyed this past weekend:
- David Marchese interviewing Marilynne Robinson about God, among other things, in the New York Times. (Although she whiffed on his “What do you do that’s bad” question, IMO! “How do you get into trouble?” Marchese asks. “Do you steal ketchup packets?” Her answer: “I procrastinate like crazy.” Boo; come on, Marilynne! Something juicier!)
- Laura Barton in The Guardian: “At 45, I grieved the idea of motherhood. Then, by pure fluke, I was pregnant.”
- Dorothy Fortenberry reviewing Molly Roden Winter’s polyamory memoir, in Commonweal: “I was genuinely shocked when I read the book, not by how graphic it is, but by how sad.”
- And Becca Rothfeld on sex, transformation, and David Cronenberg, in The New Yorker (excerpted from her forthcoming book): “Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative, but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be.” (!)
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