#guildtalk

Writing poetry for me is pretty cold, actually. Just really focused on the image, and the word, and the line, and it’s interesting and it’s compelling. It’s a kind of an escape for me, a person who is very control-oriented. What is more controlled than a poem? Writing memoir, you’re really grappling with yourself. At one point in the summer I started to feel this sense that I was becoming my own ghost and haunting myself. Because of the way you have to go back. You have to go back to all of these different iterations of who you were, or who you thought you were, who you still think are, and compare and contrast and it becomes this echo chamber of all of these different versions of yourself. And, of course, all of the different people in your life.

Because I listened well, people—both friends and strangers—confided in me, and as I listened, I learned how rare a clear-cut situation was. I found my shyness quite painful then, but I think it has rewarded me as a writer. And as I tell my students, the things that make you a better person also make you a better writer: step outside your milieu, engage with strangers, find meaningful work, travel, read.

I feel like people are talking more seriously about me as a novelist now, whereas the focus of the first book in terms of PR and marketing was very much “nurse made good.” I got asked continuously about my day job as a nurse, which I still have, but I haven’t been asked about it as much on this round of publicity. I was a novelty. When I won the Costa First Novel Prize I was pitted against Julian Barnes and people like that. For the press, it was a great hook; and for the tabloid press in particular, it was fantastic to be able to write “Nurse Pitted Against Literary Heavyweight” type headlines.

When you grow up somewhere, you can take it for granted. You don’t know anything else so you assume that it’s like everywhere else. Or more accurately, that everywhere else is like the place you grow up. Then you start to go out into the world—you visit other places, you go to college—and you realize that isn’t the case. Other places and other people are different, often very different. Not better or worse but different. At some point, you either start to feel proud of where you’re from or you feel shame. Or you feel a mix of the two. When I was out in the world, I would occasionally meet someone from Staten Island who didn’t want to be from Staten Island or wanted to downplay it as much as possible. I never understood that. For me, I was always proud, almost defiantly proud, of being from Staten Island.