Literary Birthday – 10 December – Helen Oyeyemi

Nine Quotes

1. Please tell me a story about a girl who gets away.
2. Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed the line.
3. The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.
4. I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading – a lot.
5. It’s true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story’s story – the way a story is received and interpreted and used – the audience plays a part in that too.
6. For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.
7. Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you’re not feeling very well, or as a child.
8. The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven’t got an attitude problem.
9. I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.

Helen Oyeyemi is British novelist. She was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 2013. Her latest novels are What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and Boy, Snow, Bird.

Source

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photo_of_author_Helen_Oyeyemi,_taken_in_January_2021.jpg

H-minus, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar