Shelley Jackson
Describe your latest project.
Half Life is a novel narrated by a two-headed woman in a looking-glass world where conjoined twins are plentiful enough to have their own subculture, slang, and self-help books. Nora has gotten used to the first person pronoun in the ten years her twin has been sleeping. Now that Blanche seems to be waking up, chances are she'll try to stick her oar in, and Nora takes measures to stop her. Some dead animals sing songs. A doll house proves to be a good hiding place. There are double agents and disguises, hidden figures and coded messages, ghosts and secrets. Bad things happen to people, but it's pretty hard to apportion blame, especially when two people share a trigger finger — and a pen.
If you could choose any story to live in, what story would that be? Why?
I spent my entire childhood squeezing through anything that looked like a portal to another world. Having finally succeeded in reaching this one, I think I'll stay. However, I would like to die in one of Kelly Link's stories, where death seems to be a place where everything reminds you eerily of something very important that you can't quite remember.
What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I'm torn between Robin Hood and Pippi Longstocking. They are both dashing, original, and brave. They fight injustice, wear tights, and make their homes in strange places. Robin Hood can split an arrow at forty paces, while Pippi can juggle and lift a horse. In addition, she's a Thing-Finder, she makes up stories, and her pigtails stick straight out. In lieu of dating her, I've tried to become her, but can only lift very small horses. I have, however, found some prime Things, including a stuffed baby alligator, a wedding ring, and an x-ray of the intestines of someone named Popke.
Writers are better liars than other people: true or false.
More creative, less convincing. A good lie makes a bad story, and vice versa.
What is your astrological sign? If you don't like what you were born with, what sign would you change to and why?
I write about Siamese twins and patchwork girls, doubles and multiples, and I have an ampersand tattooed on my arm. I'm a Gemini, what else? (But see previous.)
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
(This is a bad lie that makes a good story.)
What is your favorite literary first line?
I wish either my father or my mother,
or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it,
had minded what they were about when
they begot me; had they duly consider'd
how much depended upon what they
were then doing; -- that not only the
production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy
formation and temperature of his body,
perhaps his genius and the very cast of
his mind; -- and, for aught they knew
to the contrary, even the fortunes of his
whole house might take their turn from
the humours and dispositions which were
then uppermost: -- Had they duly
weighed and considered all this, and
proceeded accordingly, -- I am verily
persuaded I should have made a quite
different figure in the world, from that,
in which the reader is likely to see me.
—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
What is your idea of absolute happiness?
Happiness is never absolute. If happiness is a state it's one of perpetual incompleteness, but I think it's an activity, that of trying to find your way to another world.
|
Don't Miss
