10 Questions for Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom's 1993 first short story collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award. At the time, her experience as a practicing psychotherapist seemed to explain in part the intimacy, the empathy and range of her work, her eerie ability to get inside her characters. The Los Angeles Times critic called her 1997 first novel, Love Invents Us, "lyrical and funny," noting, "There is a line worth quoting on almost every page of this book." A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, her 2000 collection, is a series of survival stories, including the powerful "Rowing to Eden" (see below). She followed that in 2002 with a nonfiction book, Normal:Transsexual CEOS,Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude," which started with an article she wrote for The New Yorker about female-to-male transsexuals.

Q.What are you working on now?

A. Finished a novel, Away, coming out from Random House, August 2007. Finished!

Q. Are you also teaching now? Where? How does teaching affect your own work?

A. I teach at Yale every spring, two writing workshops, small classes of twelve to fourteen students. Teaching gives me a chance to get my thoughts more clear about writing and to see, every time, what a difference a word makes. I only edit for my friends and that, again, makes me hyperconscious of every word--and a great appreciator of other writers.

Q. How do you divide up your time? Do you have a habit of writing in a certain place at a certain time?

A. I wish that I was more disciplined. I do my serious writing in a shed in the back yard, from two or three in the afternoon until about eight or nine p.m. I do my magazine work and correspondence on a laptop in my house.

Q. How do you decide the point of view you might take for a story? Or to shift points of view within a story?

A. I don't really decide. I listen for the voice of the character who's been kicking around for a while.If several clear voices emerge, I can write from their points of view, as well.

Q. You list a "bookshelf" on your website. Could you explain the meaning of these books to your writing life? (The books include Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy;Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body;Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy;John Derbyshire, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream;Rosina Lippi, Homestead; Margot Livesey, Criminals; Colum McCann, Everything in This Country Must, Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception, Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle, Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden.)

A. These are all great writers, lovers of the word, lyrical even when stripped down, clean and tight, even when they are blossoming. Their sentences please me as a reader, and illuminate the craft for me as a writer.

Q. You are the daughter of two writers. Did you consider not becoming a writer? Did you become a psychotherapist and then a writer? A writer and then a therapist? Were the two impulses intertwined?

A.I was a waitress, a bartender,an actress, a stage manager--then a social worker for ten years before I was writing. I never planned or dreamt about becoming a writer. The impulse for both is probably endless curiosity, a love of the telling detail and a strong streak of voyuerism.

Q. You have written in great detail about illness, including cancer. In your short story "Rowing to Eden," for instance, you describe a woman getting chemo: "Once they have been through the saline and the Benadryl and the Zoloft, it's time to get down to business, and the business of Taxol is a small well of fire at the point of entry, shooting up Mai's arm like a gasoline trail. The instant hot packs are godsends, and Ellie collects them, along with lightweight blankets from all the other patient corners, so that when Mai lies down there is a small mountain of plastic on her nightstand and a pile of thermal-weave cotton at the foot of her bed. The hot packs release their heat immediately, after one hard squeeze on their thin plastic edges. It's exactly like cracking an egg one-handed, which Ellie also likes to do for her own pleasure. Mai smiles like a junkie as soon as she hears the pop of the inner casing, and Ellie tucks three blankets up around her." Does this come from clinical experience? Personal experience? Research?

A. This comes from sitting by the bed of my best friend, during her chemo.

Q. Virginia Woolf took time to review books while working on her novels. Do you manage various kinds of writing during a given day, week or month? Or do you focus singlemindedly on one form--i.e., a novel, a collection of stories, a play?

A. I write for TV and essays for magazines while I do my serious fiction. I don't review because bad books often make for great reviews and even bad books are hard to write, so I have stopped reviewing.

Q. You were raised in the New York area and live now in Connecticut. Do you find yourself writing primarily about locations in the East? Have you lived in other places? If so, how has that affected your work?

A. I am an East Coast person who like LA, loves Italy and is generally partial to hot places. In the new novel, the heroine goes from Russia,to Alaska, via America and I have now learned to appreciate the beauty of cold places as well. But I'll never prefer them.

Q. Beginning with your early stories, you have received honors and some outstandingly positive reviews. How do you feel about the critical reception your work has gotten over the years?

A. I feel very lucky about the generally positive response. I read my first few reviews of Come To Me--and then stopped, and never started again. There were mistakes or misunderstandings in even the great reviews and there was one bad one which hurt my feelings and I thought, To feel all this about remarks from people I don't know and who don't know me--makes no sense. And that was it for me.