If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth – only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

But I think that at the moment of my death, I’d like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved.

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.” –.

The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who’s going to read it, what they’re going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.

How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes?

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life – even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine – and still not know the truth of oneself.

But when the self – not a fictional character – is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even as the ground shifts beneath us. This is, of course, not only a literary problem. –.