Literary Birthday – 8 August – Elizabeth Tallent

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Tallent, born on 8 August 1954.

Elizabeth Tallent Quotes

1. People open bookstores because they want their souls back. (‘Two Women’)
2. Not long ago, in a frenzy of cultural homesteading, literary fiction began appropriating the personae of real individuals, mostly dead, mostly famous. While this wasn’t a brand-new tactic, and its appeal had long been recognized—when Virginia Woolf chose to narrate Flush from the vantage point of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, she meant the novel to be a bestseller—the sheer number of writers relying on this approach was new, and suggested that the relation between narration and “reality” (when the word reality plunks down, the doves of double quotes fly up) was being reimagined, not writer by writer, but communally, in a far-flung literary project with a terrific appetite for figures who had in common two things: first, they were in some way compelling; second, they’d once lived and breathed. (The Trouble with Postmortality)
3. Again, then, what good is a dead narrator? Well, by virtue of their recently dramatically changed circumstances the newly dead could possess that marvel-ous narratorial quality: they could be curious. (The Trouble with Postmortality)
4. Book by book, perfectionism hamstrung writing. You’d think this curtailment would be painful. That it would raise loud alarms for a writer. But the crippling approached with anesthetizing softness. … [Perfectionism] didn’t stop writing, it merely diverted it into feats of repetition — of, to be more exact, replication: the same paragraph typed over and over. Sometimes I was down to as little as a single sentence monomaniacally typed out word for word. … The very perfectionism that was shutting down writing imbued the process with a thrilled momentousness … I was always closing in on the most beautiful thing I’d ever written. (Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism)
5. I’m not very detached about perfectionism, I’m like a person whose house is on fire, writing a book about fire … (Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism)

Elizabeth Tallent is an American literary fiction writer, essayist, and academic. Her fiction explores the tension between her characters’ longing for stability, security, and safety and their equally strong desire for risk, change, and freedom. Tallent is the author of the novel Museum Pieces and four short story collections. Her story ‘Tabriz’ received a Pushcart Prize in 2008. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Threepenny Review, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize Award, and The Best American Essays. In 2020, she published her memoir Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism. Tallent teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives on the Mendocino Coast with her wife, an antiques dealer.

Source for photograph: Stanford, Department of English

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar