“Some people like to believe that being edited is a tense and acrimonious business but my experience of the process has always been quite the opposite. Carin Besser at the New Yorker encouraged me to let the stories be. Just be. A lot of the editing involved peeling away layers of personal anxiety, not in any therapeutic sense, but in the art—scraping off trace deposits left in the tone, removing lines of dialogue that were overly articulate, scorifying exposition that was false because it interfered.”

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“It puts me in mind of a description of writing I heard somewhere: that what we writers do is create, every day, the very ground we need to stand on.”

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