A biography for Laura van den Berghasn’t been written yet.
“When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.”
“I'm such a first-person writer.”
“I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.”
“A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.”
“Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.”
“Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.”
“For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions.”
“If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.”
“I lived in Florida until I was 22.”
“I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.”
“In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.”
“Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.”
“I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.”
“Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.”
“Culturally, there is often the expectation that women should be repelled by anything too ugly, too violent.”
“When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best.”
“I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.”
“America loves a good comeback story!”
“Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.”
“There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.”