Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer, born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
trying
Divinity. That's what I'm trying to get at, in everything I write.
men trying body
Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.
work
I see my work as a continuum, moving from book to book.
book books children valued war women
Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.
adult bind both business divided divorced kids though
That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced - though I was adult - but I still grappled with being responsible to both of them.
builds image inside maybe periods tension time via work
I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up - when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about - and I'm thinking about it all the time, but I'm not really inside it, inside the writing.
guild member subversive
I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.
I don't investigate things by writing about them, but let them build up inside of me.
carefully paragraph
I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.
theory
It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.
larger provides writers
Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.
I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.
suggested
Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.