Literary Birthday – 12 July – Lisa Halliday

Happy Birthday, Lisa Halliday, born on 12 July 1976.

Lisa Halliday Quotes

1. I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom. (Asymmetry)
2. Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love. (Asymmetry)
3. As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again. (Asymmetry)
4. In Italy, writing my first novel, I felt clandestine, almost anonymous. This made it easier to write less self-consciously. (EasyMilano)
5. Working in publishing was a pleasure and a privilege, a thrilling period that was both an invaluable education and a vigorous whetting of my work ethic… I learned to take my time writing my first novel, to wait until I felt it was well and truly finished, the very best I could make it, before submitting it to an agent. (EasyMilano)

Lisa Halliday is an American writer and novelist best known for her novel Asymmetry. While studying at Harvard in 1997, she wrote The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard 1997–1998. Her short story ‘Stump Louie‘ was published in The Paris Review in 2005. Asymmetry earned Halliday a Whiting Award in 2017 and was named by Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2018. Since 2023, Halliday has served as the literary executor of the estate of Louise Glück.

Source for photograph: Martin Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MJK63709_Lisa_Halliday_(Frankfurt_Book_Fair_2018).jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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