Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloomis an American writer and psychotherapist. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
everybody period whether
I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves.
babysitter bartender drew liked people rather spent suspect time true waitress
I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.
elderly family hear history kept painful parents plus spoke stories terrible
My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.
except people tend
People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.
certainly shut teaches therapist useful
Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.
truth
The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo.
alice austen dickens fine influenced jane paintings plays stories sure
I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
anyone audience behavior finds funny human target
My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.
books centuries happiness people pursuing trash worse
Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.
philip
There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
assume time writer
I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.
apparently except home job
I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.
almost entire learned life scripts
I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.
overall
I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.