Susan Shreve
Susan Shreve
Susan Shreveis an American novelist, memoirist, and children’s book author. She has published fourteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of My Life, and a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood. She has also published thirty books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes, and co-edited five anthologies. Shreve founded the Master of Fine Artsin Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980, where she teaches fiction writing. She is the co-chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency.
My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children.
My mother listened to everything I said, carefully - not that what I said was particularly interesting, but I was her daughter.
As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.
Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.
So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.
In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known.