“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?
In composition, when it’s going well, nearly everything – I mostly don’t know what I’m doing. I have to get it on the page and make plans in revision.
What is the first thing you remember reading or being read to?
My mother doing the voice of the camel, reading The Just So Stories.
Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
“Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?” (The close of Grace Paley’s “A Conversation With My Father”).
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?
Goodykoontz’s Perpetual Calendar and General Reference: A book for the millions, an oddball reference book, hand-lettered, given to me by my first cousin twice-removed Elizabeth.
Have you ever regretted publishing something?
No doubt, but I feel if I admitted what it was, I might rip myself in half like Rumpelstiltskin.
Proust had madeleines. Which foods or meals trigger your memory?
Canned chicken noodle soup. Cheese soufflé. Noodle kugel. A certain brand of cookies from Massachusetts called Peggy Lawton.
Have you had any notable experiences meeting authors you admire?
I once accidentally touched Salman Rushdie’s leg on stage; when I confessed this to a friend in the audience, she said, “I know! I saw that!” Once I accidentally shook the right breast of a writer (instead of her hand). Mostly I try to avoid meeting writers I admire.
Do you have a favourite bookshop?
Many, though my heart will always belong to Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa.
How does distraction inform your writing?
I am so distractible that I have to block the internet when I write. Distraction and trying to avoid it shapes my days.
What are you currently reading or watching?
Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face.
Who has influenced your writing?
Everyone I am related to, by blood and marriage.
Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life?
I’m not sure! It might be Jimmy Scott singing John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”.
Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page?
I do a lot of thinking which generally turns out to be useless once I am actually writing, so I’m forced to say it all happens on the page.
What is the worst job you ever had?
I delivered papers very badly as a child; later, I was a very bad assistant to two professors of library science.
If you could choose any piece of art to hang above your desk, what would it be?
Christian Schad’s “Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove”. Though I can’t ask for anything better than the large drawing of Carson McCullers that Edward Carey drew for me in our early years together.
What was your favourite text studied at school?
The Collected Poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Which font do you write in?
Baskerville, always.
What does a writing day look like for you?
Over my life it’s been various and at this moment it’s changing again. I’m happiest writing before I talk to another person. I’m married to the writer and illustrator Edward Carey, and we have an agreement that when one of us is in composition mode and gets up early to write, the other person, if awakened, will feign sleep. Even a fond exchange of good mornings might tip things off balance. I like to write for as many hours as are available to me, with lots of pacing.
Which other art forms are necessary to your writing?
I love live theatre and film (preferably in a cinema); I’m a constitutional audience member. But my biggest influence is visual art, particularly painting, and most particularly portraiture.
Where do you seek refuge?
For the past few years it’s been swimming early mornings in Barton Springs Pool in the centre of Austin, Texas, but I am retiring at the end of the year and moving to Bath, where I shall devote myself to long walks and also the happy dark of movie theatres.
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books including The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award), and The Hero of This Book (winner of the Wingate Prize). She has received grants
and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty best American writers under forty. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
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