Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolffis an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army. He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1945
CityBirmingham, AL
CountryUnited States of America
I'm very conscious of working from memory but I also know that someone else who was there at the same moment would write something different about it.
I have to be honest, of course, but I have to be sure that my honesty comes in a form that is not destructive because it can very easily become so.
A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.
So you're continually searching for new ways of using the story form to most perfectly contain and express the story you're telling.
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.