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Booker Prize winning author AS Byatt gives an interview to the organizers of the Man Booker Prize:
"The children of great writers for children often came to unhappy ends... My initial thesis was that the writers wanted to prolong their own childhoods and that the children thus had no place to be themselves...
"One impact of writing on families is that the writer has to spend long periods alone with a pen, and this time, and this attention, is taken from the family. I knew a writer's family where the children buried the typewriter in the garden...
"As I get older I increasingly understand that the liveliest characters - made up with the most freedom - are combinations of many, many peope, real and ficture, alive and dead, known and unknown. I really don't like the idea of "basing" a character on someone, and these days I don't like the idea of going in to the mind of the real unknown dead. Oscar Wilde appears in this novel, but the novelist doesn't say what he thinks. I am also afraid of the increasing appearance of "faction" - mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention. It feels like the appropriation of others' lives and privacy. Making other people up, which is a kind of attack on them [twaddle about how blogs and Facebook lead to suicide]...".
Byatt... does not make me want to read her books, frankly. This artificially high-minded wanky "oh, no. One does not in front of the children" tone of hers impresses me more as an indicator of her character than anything else. Some children of some children's authors are suicides? So are some children of some teachers. Writing takes time away from your family, yeah, well, so does my fucking job. I ain't got no horseshoe up my ass and nobody but me is going to pay my bills, so it's off to work I go.
Now maybe Byatt has a patron or family money or she's the last of those raised to believe that their family was their job and time away from them was theft of... parentage or love. Some goddamn thing. Whatever. I don't care but the rest of us? Have to work for a living and sometimes that is incompatible with perfect domestic harmony and motherfucking tragedy results. It was always thus.
So Byatt can step off the 'writers damage families through their monomania' or whatever Freudian guilt she is expiating and back the hell off historical fiction writers while she's at it. History is good but novelists do an important job of synthesis and reinterpretation when they deal with historical figures as well as keeping history alive in the popular mind. Byatt can take her concerns about "faction" and shove them and her Booker up her ass and spin on them.
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slammerkinbabe has a post that deals with the disingenuousness of Byatt's hierachy of imagination and characterization in more detail but suffice it to say "oh, horseshit".
"The children of great writers for children often came to unhappy ends... My initial thesis was that the writers wanted to prolong their own childhoods and that the children thus had no place to be themselves...
"One impact of writing on families is that the writer has to spend long periods alone with a pen, and this time, and this attention, is taken from the family. I knew a writer's family where the children buried the typewriter in the garden...
"As I get older I increasingly understand that the liveliest characters - made up with the most freedom - are combinations of many, many peope, real and ficture, alive and dead, known and unknown. I really don't like the idea of "basing" a character on someone, and these days I don't like the idea of going in to the mind of the real unknown dead. Oscar Wilde appears in this novel, but the novelist doesn't say what he thinks. I am also afraid of the increasing appearance of "faction" - mixtures of biography and fiction, journalism and invention. It feels like the appropriation of others' lives and privacy. Making other people up, which is a kind of attack on them [twaddle about how blogs and Facebook lead to suicide]...".
Byatt... does not make me want to read her books, frankly. This artificially high-minded wanky "oh, no. One does not in front of the children" tone of hers impresses me more as an indicator of her character than anything else. Some children of some children's authors are suicides? So are some children of some teachers. Writing takes time away from your family, yeah, well, so does my fucking job. I ain't got no horseshoe up my ass and nobody but me is going to pay my bills, so it's off to work I go.
Now maybe Byatt has a patron or family money or she's the last of those raised to believe that their family was their job and time away from them was theft of... parentage or love. Some goddamn thing. Whatever. I don't care but the rest of us? Have to work for a living and sometimes that is incompatible with perfect domestic harmony and motherfucking tragedy results. It was always thus.
So Byatt can step off the 'writers damage families through their monomania' or whatever Freudian guilt she is expiating and back the hell off historical fiction writers while she's at it. History is good but novelists do an important job of synthesis and reinterpretation when they deal with historical figures as well as keeping history alive in the popular mind. Byatt can take her concerns about "faction" and shove them and her Booker up her ass and spin on them.
slammerkinbabe has a post that deals with the disingenuousness of Byatt's hierachy of imagination and characterization in more detail but suffice it to say "oh, horseshit".Tags: