American - Novelist | - 11
That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
Jesmyn Ward
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I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
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While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.
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When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.
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I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.
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When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.
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I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.
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When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
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By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
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I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.
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Writing 'Men We Reaped' broke me in different ways at different spots in the drafting process. The first draft was hard because I was just getting it out. In some ways, that draft failed. I was really just telling the story, not making assessments - this happened, then this. Just putting those facts down on paper was really painful.
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Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
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