Amy Waldman
Amy Waldman
Amy Waldmanis an American author and journalist. She was a reporter with the New York Times for a total of eight years. For three years she was co-chief of the South Asia bureau. Before that she covered Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the aftermath of 9/11...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
character trying layers
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
country writing class
And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.
children issues parent
My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.
children two attention
My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
mash-up taste kind
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
bully sorrow
Sorrow can be a bully.
fruit pessimist brown
[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.
japan people example
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
graham jane
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.