Nov 13, 2018
A Conversation with Marina Benjamin, Author of Insomnia
“I wanted the book to celebrate what it means to live your life fully and startlingly awake.”
“I wanted the book to celebrate what it means to live your life fully and startlingly awake.”
“If I see the sun come up once in a while, it makes me feel good, like I accomplished something no one else did.”
“You can fall in love with a place in a way that’s just as made-up and selective as how you fall in love with a person.”
“I feel any person who has to deal with losing the one person who is their world has every right to do whatever it takes to self-preserve, even when that includes deflection and denial.”
“I have always been fascinated by the idea of women being monstrous and beastly because it ruptures the dominant Patriarchal ideal of the shy woman.”
“I wanted to address old-age sexuality, which is in general completely unmentioned in Taiwanese society.”
“I love that our stories are beginning to get the attention they deserve, but that’s not enough for me. I want more.”
“The idea here is the casual way children can accept and parrot this kind of simple, black-and-white math about worth. So much so that in a pinch they are willing write off their own mother!”
“I thought this exemplified two aspects of the Colombian spirit that interest and delight me: Any festive occasion can become an excuse to start a full-on party; and time is, as a manner of speaking, subjective.”
“I like melancholy and characters with weighty histories. I fell in love with Daniel. But I fall in love with all my characters.”
“I started thinking about immoral women, women who are not merely complicit counterparts to A Bad Man but active participants in cruelty.”
“When writing this story, I was thinking explicitly about a tendency in players to play games as murderous kleptomaniacs.”
“My focus was on the character and emotions of the immigrant: the loneliness, the sense of loss and disconnection.”
“Along with us lived the novel-in-progress I wore like Charlie Brown wore his hot dog costume: sometimes reluctantly, a little embarrassedly, taken out only when others asked about it.”
