Rachel Sherman is the author of the short story collection The First Hurt and the novel Living Room.
–Name a childhood hero.
Laura, the teenage babysitter with the tight jeans and feathered hair that lived up the street.
–Name a work you wished you’d written.
Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell
–If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
1st book: THE FIRST HURT
2nd book: LIVING ROOM
–Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
Virginia Woolf. Her writing, of course!
–Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
The other night I read at the Guggenheim, and afterward I read on a blog that the piece I read was “maudlin” which surprised me, since I felt like it was the most upbeat story I’d ever written.
–Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
I think a misperception about writers in general is that we are quiet and reclusive. I am neither.
–Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Arrogance
–Name your five desert island films.
Jesus’s Son
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Grey Gardens
The Royal Tenenbaums
Heartburn
–Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER
–Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.
ULYSSES
–If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
I’m not sure I would rewrite anything. I think that at the time each thing I’ve written was what I meant to write. It feels like it would be changing my own history, or going back in time. Not to say that many of the things I wrote couldn’t be better-they certainly, certainly could! Just saying that I am in a different place in my writing than I was when I wrote whatever I wrote before, so I don’t think I could go back there.
–Share the greatest literary secret/gossip you know.
I don’t know any…
–Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
AMERICAN PASTORAL
–Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
Sleep
–Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
Not being a runner.
–Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
Procrastination
–Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.
“Is that true?”
–Name a question you wish you had been asked.
“How do you procrastinate?”