WHICH IS FINALLY SICKER?
July 9th, 2006Gary Lutz to Justin Taylor:
“My characters seem to have involuntarily disimagined the differences between the sexes or between the standard categories of affection, but they cut me in on their hearts only so far before sinking back into the sentences and typography they spirited forward from. They rarely point to anything definite in my life or manage any likeness to people whose passages in life I might have been a party to.”
Q: I remember you mentioning in the Believer interview about consciously avoiding brand-names and other markers of culture and era. I think a writer’s desire to be unfettered by the stuff of his day makes sense to me in an instinctual way, but I’d like to just hear your take on it.
A: I would hate to know exactly where and when my stories are set, in what suburbial latitudes those dark days keep coming. My characters seem bent on piecing themselves out of any big picture, and I have to honor their wish. I don’t know which is finally sicker — specifics or engulfing abstractions.