Author Birthday – 17 October – Wally Lamb

Happy Birthday, Wally Lamb, born on 17 October 1950.

Wally Lamb Quotes

1. Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
2. I thought about how love was always the thing that did that – smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
3. When I was an MFA student at Vermont College for the Fine Arts, my teacher, Gladys Swan, told me I should never write for a preconceived audience. Rather, I should write for myself and have the faith that the audience that was meant to find my story would find it. She also told me that I was never going to write a completely original story because the world was a very old place, and so all the stories that people need to be told have been in the culture since ancient times. The best I could do, Gladys said, was to put my own modern spin on the archetypal stories that people always need. Study ancient myth, she was telling me; those stories have withstood the test of time because they speak to the human condition. I’ve studied myth ever since and could not have written the novels I have without having done so.
4. Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.
5. Human behaviour in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.
6. I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
7. I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I’m writing.
8. ‘Look, don’t just stare at the pages,’ I used to tell my students. ‘Become the characters. Live inside the book.’
9. Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
10. Life’s absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining.
11. I start out with a character whose voice intrigues and worries me. I let that character lead me into the story. Along the way I have to write the person’s backstory, discover the person’s childhood. It’s sort of a meandering way to write. It certainly has its built-in frustrations. The more deeply I care about the character, the more I wonder if the person is going to be okay.
12. I don’t really love to write. I’m not waking up in the morning and springing up in bed and saying ‘Oh yeah, here I go!’ It’s more like I’m worrying the characters through the story.

Wally Lamb is an American author best known for his novels She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, and The River Is Waiting. In 2021, I Know This Much Is True was adapted into a six-part HBO series starring Mark Ruffalo. Lamb holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. He taught creative writing at the University of Connecticut until 1999. Since then, he has led a writing programme for incarcerated women at York Correctional Institution. Lamb cites John Updike, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver, and Andre Dubus among the writers who have influenced him. His awards and honours include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the New England Book Award for Fiction. His novels have also been selected by Oprah’s Book Club and Germany’s Bertelsmann Book Club, and named among The New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year.

Source for Image: Wes Washington, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WallyLamb06.JPG

by Amanda Patterson
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