![]() “People have pointed out to me that I often write biracial characters, head traumas, orphans, and car accidents.” “I write characters who, for one reason or another, have difficulties fitting in with the world they seem like functional, well-adjusted people, but they all grapple with loneliness,” says Zevin. Fikry and Grossman change with age, and ultimately seek forgiveness, acceptance, and kinship. Time itself often rises to the level of character for Zevin at once a transmutable human construct, and an indomitable catalyst. The novels also reflect how public/private identities and the nature of perceptions alter over time. In many ways the book presaged both Clinton’s loss and the #MeToo movement, which emerged about two months after it was published.įikry fans were baffled, Zevin reports: “‘What’s she going on about? This is not heartwarming!’” Yet both novels address technology’s outsized impact-the influx of electronic-based reading and the Internet’s indelible record of one’s identity and missteps. Strains of a familiar scandal exist, but Zevin’s scope is deeper, exploring slut-shaming, power dynamics, and the pigeonholing of politicized women. It spans four women’s narratives across 13 years, focusing on protagonist Aviva Grossman, an undergraduate intern who has an affair with a married congressman. Zevin was interested in “Americans and debt,and how by oppressing people financially, you get to control them politically.” And 2017’s Young Jane Young wasfinished as Hilary Clinton competed with Donald Trump. Her 2010 book, The Hole We’re In, features a family sucked dumbly into consumerism and a daughter’s drive to transcend it. ![]() But it also offers a salient political and cultural critique-all Zevin’s fiction does. The novel is heartwarming and beautifully crafted each chapter opens with an ingenious plug from Fikry for a real short story hinting at what’s to come: “Lamb to the Slaughter,” by Roald Dahl, and “A Conversation with My Father,” by Grace Paley, among others. “I mean, the French get it: they call books ‘an essential good,’ you know?” “ Fikry was really about how we have some ability to affect what our townscapes look like and, to me, bookstores were, and are, an issue of vital importance-I really wanted them to survive,” she says from the Los Angeles home she shares with partner Hans Canosa ’93 and their two aging rescue dogs. And in promoting her book, she championed independent stores, libraries, and devoted print readers. Fikry (2014) while worrying about Amazon’s widening grip. Novelist Gabrielle Zevin ’00 wrote The Storied Life of A.J. “No man is an island every book is a world.” The motto, adapted from John Donne, appears on a weathered sign for the ailing bookshop owned by the irascible A.J. ![]()
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