April 2017

"Reality destroys our illusions with extreme cruelty. Devastating cruelty." Virginia Fly is a dreamer. Day and night, she dreams of languid caresses and a fiery mustachioed man slipping into her bed.

"She only saw what she wanted to see." When their eldest son drowns during a vacation in Thailand, the Douglas family falls apart. Parents separate. Their daughter Maddie, who feels responsible for the accident, spirals.

"Every writer testifies to this: something escapes them. The writing process is a chemical operation that can't be entirely controlled. Readers find things you never intended to put there, yet somehow made it into the text."

"The damp smell of poisonous mushroom, the smell of absolute failure rising from that drawer made me faint." What if a writer escaped reality to become a character in one of his own novels? That's the kind of experience awaiting this story's hero.

"What's wonderful about books is that they're films playing in our heads." That day, Anthony Peardew waited for his fiancée in vain. A few streets away, she had just succumbed to a ruptured aneurysm.

"We created the need for interior breach like perfect capitalists. Consented extraction of their least publishable data, wild sharing and collective enjoyment of this abdication." Contemporary writers continue to surprise me.

"See? In fairy tales we do what we want, in reality we do what we can." Elena Ferrante is so skilled at slipping a formidable cliffhanger at the end of each novel. I was eager to return to Elena and Lila.

"Most people prefer beautiful, well-crafted fables to truths as complex as they are useless." An unfinished manuscript, the murder of a memory specialist, a mixture of real and fiction—didn't need more to dive in.

"If there's one thing experience has taught me, it's to never underestimate the extreme difficulty of understanding a situation from someone else's point of view." After several dark novels, I was looking for a lighter story.