Molly Antopol
Molly Antopol
Molly Antopol is an American fiction and nonfiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
character thinking israel
With the Israel stories, it was for me the most surprising way the title would fit in. I kept thinking about, for a lot of my Israeli characters, what it was like to inherit such a complicated and symbiotic relationship to America and to feel how tangled that is, and it's nothing that they chose to do themselves.
writing thinking brain
But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade.
writing thinking holocaust
It really made me nervous to write about it [Holocaust] and to approach it, because I was nervous about how to do it respectfully, and I was also thinking about how I could add something new to something that had already been so explored.
book writing thinking
The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.
book writing thinking
It was tricky [to write about Israelis], because everyone has an opinion about the Arab - Israeli conflict, and when I first started writing these stories, I was working for an Arab - Israeli human rights group. It was during the Second Intifada. It was this totally violent and intense time, and I think there's a part of me where I don't know how to write about that situation without getting my politics out of my messages, and that's something that was important for me not to do in this book.
author characters dropped love loves situations stories takes
The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.
authors began cherish henry learned people prize search since stories trying whose work year
I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.
believed create exact expert fiction formed history job learn politics reader replica responsibility step
I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
certain felt inspiring needed novel stories writers
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
address experience imagine jewish life themes
I can't imagine writing something that didn't address Jewish themes and questions. It's such a big part of my life, a lot of the way in which I experience the world.
action easy found lying naturally setting
I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.
family hearing liked
I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.
certain exploring fiction life main people reasons truths understand
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
admire dead endings idle longer moments pacing stories surprising time work writers
One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.