A biography for Laura van den Berghasn’t been written yet.
“The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.”
“I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.”
“If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.”
“I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.”
“The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.”
“I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself.”
“The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.”
“I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.”
“Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.”
“Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.”
“'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural.”
“If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'”
“I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.”
“I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.”
“As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college.”
“Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.”
“In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason.”
“Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.”
“Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.”
“It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.”