Author Birthday – 7 October – Rachel Kushner

Happy Birthday, Rachel Kushner, born on 7 October 1968.

Rachel Kushner Quotes

1. I’m not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books, there are no short cuts. (R K News)
2. People often consider the solitude aspect to be essential, that creativity is locked up inside you and you’re waiting for the moment to release it. I subscribe to a different worldview. It’s through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced. (The Nation)
3. I found inspiration for this novel in my own fears, dreams, hangups, childhood, and adolescence. (And yet perhaps those are nothing special, merely the grains from which all novels are formed.) A novel is a chance to get mugged in a dark alley by your own unconscious, or at least, to have an encounter with yourself. (The Booker Prizes)
4. I do study Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect. (Guernica)
5. In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self—either with quality goods or with, at least, ‘good efforts’. Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming. (Guernica)
6. Every scene in the book is meant to, I mean should, both deepen the characters featured in it, and put pressure on the subjects, themes, and various kinds of meaning that come up in the writing. (Full Stop)
7. I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable; like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies… A writer who cares about the world and about the smaller but not insignificant details that can be cracked open to find humor and meaning. That’s how I like to feel when I’m reading and what I try to go for when I am writing. (Full Stop)
8. I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image. (The Paris Review)
9. At this point in my life, I’m not that interested in third person. There’s a certain falsity when a character is given a full name and a set of characteristics and can be seen from outside. To me it speaks of a kind of realism whose artifice I have a hard time shaking, as a writer, in order to get inside what I am doing and imagine it fully. (The Paris Review)
10. People have always said, Don’t write in the first person unless you have a very particular voice you want to use. I came in with the exact opposite proposition. I wanted to find a voice that was not performed. And I think that a lot of times the first person—quite powerfully—is a confessional form. It’s testimonial. (The Paris Review)

Rachel Kushner is an American literary fiction writer whose work blends historical, political, social, and genre fiction. Her novels explore revolution, power, art, feminism, freedom, inequality, institutions, and the tension between individuals and the societies they inhabit. She is the author of The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels Creation Lake, The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into 29 languages.

Source for photograph: The Booker Prizes, Chloe Aftel

by Amanda Patterson
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