Literary Birthday – 9 April – Catherine Lacey

Happy Birthday, Catherine Lacey, born on 9 April 1985.

Catherine Lacey Quotes

1. The first story I ever wrote, at age seven, was a re-telling of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. In my version, a little girl buys a red convertible and drives away. No wolf. No grandma. Just a hood-less red car. (Headlands)
2. Writing books is my preferred way to escape the burden of having a self, of carrying that self around your whole life, of never totally understanding why you are the way you are, nor why other people are the way they are. (Headlands)
3. The Red Riding Hood story used to be a joke I’d tell, but now it seems to me the subject I had the impulse to write about at seven– a story of escaping limits, of rejecting the previous script– it pretty much sums up everything I ever hope to do. (Headlands)
4. This is also a benefit of writing a book that is focused on a single first-person character. You can get to a point of almost automatic writing when you spend a few hours every day with the same voice. (The White Review)
5. I tend to learn more deeply through failure, so I want to see people failing in stories. My worst moments and relationships have taught me how I don’t want to behave or be treated; I had to see it first. (The White Review)
6. I think one of the biggest threats or hurdles to writing fiction is thinking you know what you’re doing, thinking you’re in control. Artists are constantly waiting for the moments where we get out of our own way and write as if no one is ever going to read it. (The White Review)
7. I started writing not only without the expectation of publication, but without the idea of it at all. I thought I was going to be a writer of essays. (The White Review)
8. I think my method is closer to digging through myself to reach other people. There is nothing so particular about any one person’s experience that she should be ashamed of it or try to bury it by writing about someone totally different from oneself. Everyone is essentially living the same story. (The White Review)
9. For many years I was very rigid about writing in the morning and I may become that person again some day, but lately I’ve been realizing I like to read first thing in the morning so I’ve been writing at odd hours, late morning, late night, with afternoon tea, whenever. (Literary Hub)
10. When I don’t feel inspired to write, I don’t write, and I don’t worry about it. If deadlines require me to work anyway, usually taking a long walk alone with no phone and no destination helps set me in the right state of mind to write. (Literary Hub)

Catherine Lacey is an American writer. She is the author of four novels: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, a short story collection, Certain American States, and one work of both memoir and fiction, The Möbius Book. Her honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman fellowship, an O. Henry, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. In 2017 Lacey was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She has taught at Columbia University in the Writing Program at the School of the Arts. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catherine_Lacey_2015.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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