Adams, Alice - Alice Adams with Neil Feineman (interview date 1980)
Alice Adams with Neil Feineman (interview date 1980)
SOURCE: "An Interview with Alice Adams," in Story-Quarterly, No. 11, 1980, pp. 27-37.
[Below, Adams discusses the style, themes, and characters of her fiction.]
[Feineman]: I had loved Families and Survivors so much that I couldn't even finish Listening to Billie when it came out. But in rereading it, I found it a much better book than Families and Survivors.
[Adams]: I think it is a better book, a more difficult book. As you just said, it's not instantly appealing. It was a terribly hard book to write.
In it, you define poetry as, among other things, an overreaction to experience. Does this describe your own writing as well?
Yes, I suppose the quote was more personal than a definition of poetry. All my life—and I suppose this is true of most writers—I've been accused of overreacting. People say calm down, for heaven's sake, take it easy. But I...
[The entire page is 4539 words long]
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