Jennifer Gilmore Quotes

#1. You think the worst is behind you, but it's never behind you. In fact, saying something is the worst does not leave room for all the bad stuff that can follow it. You say the pain is nine, but you mean ten. You leave room.

Jennifer Gilmore

#2. My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

Jennifer Gilmore

#3. Idea of the generations continuing is really important. And that's interesting to me. I write about families; I'm interested in families. Even though I think a family can be just two people or two people and a dog, I really wanted children for that reason.

Jennifer Gilmore

#4. History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

Jennifer Gilmore

#5. My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.

Jennifer Gilmore

#6. The birth mother is placing the baby out of love. I still believe that. Well, the ones we've dealt with who were actually pregnant, anyway.

Jennifer Gilmore

#7. As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

Jennifer Gilmore

#8. Sometimes you stop seeing what the person is to the world. You only see what the person is to you.

Jennifer Gilmore

#9. With domestic adoption, you get a form, you fill it out, and there are these boxes: African-American, African-American and Hispanic, and you check the boxes that you're comfortable with. Race is completely open in that regard.

Jennifer Gilmore

#10. I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books.

Jennifer Gilmore

#11. What is it about the blank page that makes me want to hurl myself into a game of solitaire? I ask myself these kinds of questions while I'm playing solitaire.

Jennifer Gilmore

#12. I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.

Jennifer Gilmore

#13. I wanted a baby of color, to be honest, because I wasn't attached to the idea that I look like the biological mother. I liked the idea of the adoption being clear; it was and is not something I am interested in hiding.

Jennifer Gilmore

#14. The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways.

Jennifer Gilmore

#15. I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

Jennifer Gilmore

#16. I find I have to touch what I am working on every day, or a deep-seated dread kicks in that is very hard to overcome.

Jennifer Gilmore

#17. While I am very much Jewish 'identified,' I'm not a very religious person.

Jennifer Gilmore

#18. I want to say that, in general, when it works, open adoption is great.

Jennifer Gilmore

#19. I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

Jennifer Gilmore

#20. I think that when the world feels safe and secure, we probably feel more that way in our personal lives. What goes on in the world affects us, unequivocally.

Jennifer Gilmore

#21. The world is a dysfunctional place in so many ways. It is unstable. So even though that chaos can be reflected in our own homes, I suppose we have to fight that by creating our own versions of safety, which can also turn into ignoring the state of the world.

Jennifer Gilmore

#22. I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.

Jennifer Gilmore

#23. I will say, in open adoption, all these choices you make about race, about the amount of mental illness you can deal with, about special needs and physical maladies, you have to lay all this out there before you know anybody's story.

Jennifer Gilmore

#24. It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn't seriously grieving.

Jennifer Gilmore

#25. People might seem to have a perfectly fine life but inside, we don't even know if they've suffered.

Jennifer Gilmore

#26. The process of open adoption is not discussed in the way it should be. Everyone I know who has adopted domestically has at least one tragic story. It was important to me to be able to describe those situations.

Jennifer Gilmore

#27. Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

Jennifer Gilmore

#28. I'm a morning person: if I don't get up, put the coffee on and get to my desk by 8, the day has already lost a lot of its promise.

Jennifer Gilmore