is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in. In this episode, Mitzi talks to Adelle Waldman about her new novel, .
Once you were immersed in this world of big box stores, was there something that struck you the most that allowed you to begin to create fiction around it? I do think there was that bumping up of the comic and the serious to me, that’s, I think what draws me because I am just really not capable of writing lyrical fiction. I admire it. The only register that I can write in seems to be a sort of slightly comic ironic one or like lightly comic, not necessarily full of hijinks.
But the fact that the store, the environment, had a setting that was just waiting for sort of comedy and irony for all sorts of reasons. But also, there being something there that felt urgent and worth writing about. I think I’ve felt this sense over the years that I had always intended to write psychological novels that I assumed would be about the psychological problems of middle class people.
And I think that’s an absolutely valid subject for fiction. I love Jane Austen, who wrote six or seven beautiful novels – excellent novels – I s.
