Mary Kay Zuravleff Quotes

#1. Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#2. I tried the line out on some people on the street, like, "What do you think of this: 'the art of family life is to not take it personally'?" And they would laugh. But you know, everybody's got something going on in their families, and then once you have kids, that of course exponentially rises.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#3. We should have made do at home. We threw away so much food."

Ricky says, "We ran out of ketchup," and the rest of them concur. No ketchup, no dinner.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#4. The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#5. I realized early on in writing the book that it needed to be from a family point of view, and that nobody outside the family would weigh in. And then well into writing it, the question became how to balance the perspectives; how to switch between chapters.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#6. Math-thinking, I would say, encourages flipping and substituting letters in words (in the novel, one of the boys double-majors in math and myth, for example, and his twin cracks a joke about the father's handwriting that morphs "cacography" into "dadography").

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#7. I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff