![]() ![]() You looked after your grandmother in her declining years. But it’s a very, very tough time, and this book definitely came out of the presidential election, and the celebration of wealth, the idea that nothing could be better than being rich. ![]() People are trying to hold up their light, and God love them. You write, “By 1968, pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot.” Is that true now? I imagined every mother on my street who has young children, and her leaving her children to go and do important work for the poor. I sat down on the carpet in the middle of my office. We sing songs about Odysseus, and we pray to the Buddha, and nobody thinks about their sons. ![]() There is definitely a different standard for men and women, and I wanted to take that on. What I realized in having it bomb so completely is that you cannot write a sympathetic character who leaves her children for ethical reasons. I wrote this book, got all the way to the end, read it, hated it, threw it away and started over. From the point of view of somebody without kids, do you feel that mothers are judged overly harshly? This book is also about good people who are not very good mothers. That was why I wrote this book in first person, because all Danny knows is what Andrea chooses to show him. I have this shortcoming that whenever I get too close to anybody, I become sympathetic to them. ![]() The greatest lack I think in my body of work, if, God forbid, you were to read it all, is that I don’t write villains. ![]()
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