Andrea Barrett
The final decades of the twentieth century saw American fiction grapple with the intersection of scientific inquiry and human experience, producing writers who drew the laboratory and the archive into literary prose. Andrea Barrett, born in Boston on November 16, 1954, emerged from that period as a novelist and writer whose work occupied that particular territory.
Educated at Union College, Barrett went on to work as both a writer and a university teacher. Her story collection Ship Fever won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1996, a recognition that placed her among the more closely watched American fiction writers of her generation. She writes in English, and her output spans novels and shorter fiction, with the two forms informing each other across her career.
The honors Barrett has received reflect sustained attention from the literary and academic communities alike. In addition to the National Book Award, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an O. Henry Award. The MacArthur Fellowship, in particular, is granted to individuals whose work demonstrates originality and dedication across a field, and its award to Barrett stands as one of the more concrete measures of the regard in which her writing has been held.
Quotes by Andrea Barrett
Slowly, I began to relearn something I’d once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion – that central element of fiction – derives not from information or from explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of the facts, but specifically from powerful images and from the qualities of language: diction, rhythm, form, structure, association, metaphor. And sometimes I also had glimmers of another thing I’d once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion.
We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.
Adrianne Harun’s dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.
It’s hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It’s the greatest secret of the world.
I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write. We feel we don't fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we're not of it. You don't need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.
It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world.
Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins.
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.
Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.