That was just fun.ĬWM: Your characters, too, do a lot of moving around to different places, often in a restless way.ĬS: It’s funny, I think that just happens. So, with Prosperous Friends, I know I spent a lot of happy time looking at different lofts in Chelsea and elsewhere. I also really love looking at real estate. I can’t say I know it well, but I’ve had some very potent experiences in different spots in Los Angeles. There are some landscapes that I think are really powerful. But that doesn’t seem to be as true any more-it’s just that something catches my fancy. If I was in a cold climate, I might write about the desert, for example. I used to base my choices on wherever it was I really wanted to be. Can you talk about how place figures as a conscious or unconscious effort as you’re writing a book?Ĭhristine Schutt: Yes, place is important. And in Prosperous Friends, we follow a young couple through a few years wherein they’re near-nomadic. In All Souls, the school the novel is set in feels to be just as much a character as the people in it. And of course there is Florida itself, which is both a literal and a figurative place to escape to. Later, she is split between California and New York. In Florida, Alice, orphaned, is shuffled off to live in her relatives’ many different houses in the Northern Midwest and Tucson. Louis beneath a huge, spinning fake moon, where we discussed how her writing has changed over the years, her early love of Virginia Woolf’s biography, and her dream of writing a happy novel.Ĭhristina Wood Martinez: Whenever I read your work, I feel that place and how characters navigate their environments is very important to the conflicts found in your plots. In all her novels and stories, she lays bare, in musical and precise prose, the messiest parts of human life: ill-fitting intimacies, bad desires, fetid loneliness, physical and mental illness, and the desperate, scrabbling need for love and home-all that is most complex and contradictory in her characters.Ĭhristine and I met on a warm afternoon and sat on the rooftop patio of the Moonrise Hotel in St. She has another collection of stories, Pure Hollywood, forthcoming in spring of 2018. Now retired, she taught secondary school for many years and is the consulting editor of NOON Annual. Her stories are collected in Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. Christine Schutt is the author of three novels: Florida, a finalist for the National Book Award All Souls, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Prosperous Friends.

Christine schutt pure hollywood