Roxana Robinson’s latest novel is Cost.
–Name a childhood hero.
A great hero of mine was the fictional girl, National Velvet, who rode in the great English steeplechase race, the Grand National. I never saw the movie, but the book, by Enid Bagnold, was exquisitely written, and it made a great impression on me. Bagnold paid very close attention to the natural landscape – the south Downs, I think, of England – and also to dogs and horses. She took animals very seriously, and wrote about them with respect.
National Velvet may have been the first literary book I read – I remember reading parts of it out loud to my mother, because the sentences were so beautiful. And it wasn’t simplistic or childish, it was an interesting, complicated book.
I read it because I was horse crazy. I read every book about horses I could find. And the idea of a young untrained girl and an old crossbred piebald gelding winning that incredibly competitive race together was marvelous to me. It gave me - and every other adolescent girl who read it - the secret feeling that success might be possible in life.
–Name a work you wished you’d written.
Disgrace, by JM Coetzee. This book is jarringly, shockingly good, beautifully conceived and delivered; authoritative, nearly magisterial in its power, and morally adamant. A brilliant work.
–If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
The list would probably be my books set out in chronological order.
–Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
I’d have loved to have been a contemporary of Yeats. Partly because Ireland in his time was so full of ferment, both political and literary, and partly because it was so beautiful.
–Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
When the O’Keeffe book came out I was surprised by a certain antagonistic response. O’Keeffe has been named as one of the five most famous American women, and I thought people would greet her biography with excitement. But I found that she had achieved such a presence in people’s minds that they felt proprietary about her, that some people felt they knew her better than I had. It was like writing a biography of everyone’s mother: everyone felt the need to tell me where I’d gone wrong.
–Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
I don’t even know what the perceptions about me are, let alone the misperceptions.
–Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Bad dialogue.
–Name your five desert island films.
Secrets and Lies; Le Gout des Autres, Lives of Others, The Piano
–Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
Anna Karenina.
–Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.
Infinite Jest.
–If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
I would never go back and rewrite a book, that way lies madness.
–Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
They change, but To the Lighthouse is a perennial.
–Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
Mulish determination.
–Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
Turning down invitations to write things.
–Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
Writing well.
–Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.
“Where do you get your ideas?”
–Name a question you wish you had been asked.
“What was the first book you fell in love with, and why?”