Haunted Houses

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How do you feel about being known as a “writer’s writer”? Isn’t there a certain edge to that designation?

My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.Her father said Jimmy was dirty. He didn’t brush his teeth much, even when he dropped by to see Jane. Sometimes their meetings were accidental, but Jane didn’t really believe in accidents. If questioned she would deride notions of fate—she was very rational—but still she thought Jimmy and she were meant for each other. Now that he was a senior, he drove his convertible into the city, and spent time with people Jane didn’t know. Though one high school yearbook picture shows her sitting in his convertible, it was unusual to find her there. In Conversation: Lynne Tillman and Eileen Myles, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30 What did Christine want from her or want in general. Who is Christine, she wrote, and felt disgusted. The unexpected is stronger than the expressed, it must be, she thought. She looked up ineffable and wrote, My relationship with Christine skirts the ineffable. Except Emily didn't wear skirts and why should she write about women who did? Could she use that figure of speech when it represented another kind of woman? Or, which woman was she writing about? Anyway, the thing didn't have a plot, no drama, didn't build or go anywhere. Emily comforted herself with the idea that plots were like skirts, you either did or you didn't use things like that. Why do people want stories to go somewhere, she asked herself, and retired to bed. An Interview with Lynne Tillman The novelist and critic discusses her new book of fiction—Men and Apparitions. [12]

Miller, Nicole (2018-03-24). "An Interview with Lynne Tillman". Hyperallergic . Retrieved 2021-09-30. Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept. As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away. In 1987, when Haunted Houses was first published, the figure of the young girl was hardly a topic of literary interest—unless, of course, she was being written about by men; unless she was extraordinary, a woman or a story, in a way that the (often white, and male) tastemakers could not afford to ignore. Lynne Tillman wrote about the lives of the average (though also white) girls, and she was relegated to the domain of non-recognition (in the UK, where she was published nearly a decade later, her work drew maybe one positive review, and soon went out of print). At best, she was "a writer's writer," which is shorthand for "loved by a few and for the fact of her being obscure"—but mostly, she was obscure. Yeh, James (Dec 2017 – Jan 2018). "Lynne Tillman". Interviews. Writers. The Believer. 14 (3): 66–70.Absence Makes the Heart (1990) is Tillman's first collection of short stories. The Broad Picture (1997) is a collection of Tillman's essays, which were published originally in literary and art periodicals. Her other story collections are: The Madame Realism Complex (1992); This Is Not It (2002), stories written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists; Someday This Will Be Funny (2011); and The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. Lynne Tillman: Men and Apparitions, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30 Hotjar sets this cookie to identify a new user’s first session. It stores a true/false value, indicating whether it was the first time Hotjar saw this user. Alongside the mummy issues in the novel, there is internal conflict directed at ‘daddy’. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ from the eponymous poem feels close when reading these passages. The daddy issues that the novel works through feel rooted in a modernist style, with wrought depictions of the interiority of characters. There is a passage about Jane’s father that grapples with these complex feelings within the general landscape of our harmful patriarchy: ‘but he’s your father, he’s not any man. Not any man. He is a man, the first man I knew. He was the only man for all of us, all of us women, wife, girls, daughters… He hates himself. He hates all of us. He loves himself sometimes, he loves us sometimes. Oh, Daddy’. These conflicting statements (here whirled and whipped by the winds of repetition) explore the uncertainty of self, an uncertainty that we hope will eventually settle within us, but Tillman shows us that they remain in adult life – even parenthood.