Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
American novelist.
On the island
Eight records
Frederica von Stade, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan
Because Mozart's concern in this opera is much like what I'm trying to do in my novels. I'm trying to write about society, about uh love, both from its comic and tragic side. and uh trying to give a picture of an entire world, even though a limited one.
I think because I loved it so much as a child, and it seems to me typical of the kind of fantastic, exaggerated, nonsense humour that children love, when I came to write a book about children, only children, in which the two narrators are little girls, I tried to uh get that sense again of the world as seen from a child's point of view, the love of nonsense and w craziness and the exaggerated.
Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim
Well, I first heard this when I was a freshman in college. and for me it stands for the kind of romantic view of love and marriage that I and my friends had at the time.
Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker
I first heard modern jazz when I was in college. I happened to know a man named Race Newton, who later became a jazz pianist and traveled all over England and Europe. playing jazz piano... And it was he who first played this record for me back I think about nineteen forty five.
Don Giovanni (Act II: "Eh via, buffone")
Cesare Siepi, Leontyne Price, Fernando Corena, Erich Leinsdorf
I chose it because it has to do with themes of Deception And mask and appearance and reality, which is something I have become concerned with, particularly in my later novels.
This is a song about what it's like to be stuck home with your children when you have a sense of lots going on in the real in the great world, let's say. You know that the women's liberation movement has started, that there are parties in the city And you'd like to get out, but there's no hope of it. And I've certainly felt that when I was a mother of young children.
The Beggar's Opera: "O Polly, You Might Have Toyed and Kissed"
Marjorie Westbury and Carmen Prieto
When I first came to London as a tourist back in nineteen fifty I went to a production of The Beggars' Opera. And it's connected in my mind with the love of England that I had then and still have.
no reason. It's simply one of my favorite pieces of music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:46Did you start writing stories as a child?
Oh yes, I started writing stories and poetry when I was six or seven, encouraged by my mother who was interested in this. But of course it was very amateurish until I was in college
Presenter asks
4:28When you graduated [from college], what happened to you?
I went to New York and got a job in a publishing company... It wasn't very literary. I was uh writing letters to people whose books have been rejected, uh trying to let them down slowly.
Presenter asks
7:51Were you really discouraged [when you couldn't get published]? Were you still writing, or did you stop?
Well, I did stop once for about a year... I did for a year when I was kind of exhausted, with two very small children, try not to write but I was so bored that I abandoned that idea and I went back to the typewriter, even though at that point I was convinced I'd never be published.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
What enabled you to turn the corner [and get published]?
Well, it was an accident, really. A friend of mine died suddenly, and I wanted to remember her... so I began to write a memoir... and when it was finished I showed it to some friends... one of these eventually came into the hands of a publisher who wrote and asked me if I happened to have a novel ready. I almost had finished one, so when I did finish it I sent it to him, and he accepted it.
Presenter asks
16:25Can you write anywhere, or have you got to have the right conditions?
No, I can write anywhere as long as it's uh quiet and peaceful.
“For many years I was simply a housewife and a mother.”
“For about ten years I didn't get published at all.”
“I think that my real subject is America, and though I can imagine that I might one day write a story or a novel which takes place at partly in this country, I think my characters will always have to be Americans.”