Literary Birthday – 20 April – Rebecca Makkai

Happy Birthday, Rebecca Makkai, born on 20 April 1978.

Rebecca Makkai Quotes

1. I no longer believe I can save people. I’ve tried, and I’ve failed, and while I’m sure there are people out there in the world with that particular gift, I’m not one of them…But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.
2. Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There’s a tremendous richness to that.
3. I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.
4. I might be the villain of this story.
5. Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.
6. I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don’t think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.
7. The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep
8. Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you’re too close to see the whole thing.
9. When you talk to an author – to any artist, really – you learn something about how they do what they do.

Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer of literary fiction. Her work has been translated into over 20 languages She is the author of The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower. Her novel, The Great Believers, was one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century, and a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award. It was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honours. Her latest novel is the New York Times bestseller, I Have Some Questions For You. Her short fiction won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Follow her on BlueSky

Source for image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rebecca_Makkai_2023_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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