Marisha Pessl
The early years of the twenty-first century brought a generation of American novelists into print, writers who had come through a range of academic institutions before committing themselves to fiction. Marisha Pessl, born on October 26, 1977, in Clarkston, is one of those American novelists, working in English.
Pessl's education took her through Asheville High School and the Asheville School before she went on to study at Northwestern University and Barnard College. That path, spanning institutions in North Carolina and the Northeast, formed the years leading up to her career as a writer and novelist.
As a novelist writing in English, Pessl works within American fiction. Her education at four institutions — Asheville High School, the Asheville School, Northwestern University, and Barnard College — traces a sustained period of formal study before she turned to writing. Being American and writing in English places her within a broad national literary context, though the particulars of what she has contributed as a novelist are her own.
The available record on critical reception and formal honors is limited in what it directly confirms. What the record does establish is that Pessl was born in Clarkston in 1977, educated at four institutions across different parts of the country, and works as a novelist in English. Those are the fixed coordinates of her career as a writer.
Quotes by Marisha Pessl
Marisha Pessl's insights on:
In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?'
The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all. And anyway, he’ll answer to God for what he did.” She announced this with great certainty. For a girl with nothing to her name but a parakeet, to have such unwavering belief in the reckoning of evil in the world – a belief I could never bring myself to have, having seen, time and time again, depravity go unchecked – it awed me, and it was some time before I could bring myself to speak.
Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy.
The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they’re no longer there.
I took a step inside to get a better look and realized the man was actually Christ, the way he appeared in Sunday-school classrooms: milky complexion, starched blue dressing gown, a beard trimmed as painstakingly as a bonsai tree. He was doing what he was always doing: cupping blinding light in his hands like he was trying to warm up after a long day of downhill skiing.
America’s greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream, ” Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move.
The trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they’ll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably.
