Novelist Shapiro tackles the Litquake Interview and spills the beans on her favorite dirty words. She’ll appear at the next Epicenter, April 24, which features a release party for ZYZZYVA’s spring issue.
- 1. What is your favorite book?
- Madame Bovary.
- 2. Who is your favorite writer?
- Oscar Wilde.
- 3. If the answers to 1 & 2 are different, why?
- It’s a matter of persona. I think it would be more fun to get drunk with Wilde than Flaubert.
- 4. How old were you when you were first published?
- My first novel was published when I was 32.
- 5. What writing style do you most abhor?
- When fiction is trying too self-consciously hard to be “literary,” resulting in sentences that sound pretty and clever but aren’t actually true.
- 6. What is your favorite writing cliché?
- “Write every day” is pretty amusing. That’s like ordering someone to make love every day. Write when you bloody well feel like it, or you are liable to turn it into a wearisome task like too much else in life.
- 7. What is your favorite word?
- I have to go with “fuck.” It’s so fabulously versatile. I also think “squeegee” is so adorable I used it to name my cat.
- 8. When and how do you write?
- On a MacBook. Mostly holed up in my apartment like a hermit, often in the dead of night. Occasionally in a café when the lonely silence makes my sanity fray.
- 9. What is your greatest fear when you first turn in a manuscript?
- You know when you have an intense dream that shakes you to your core, and then you try to tell someone else about it after waking up and realize that it doesn’t make any sense and you’re an idiot? I am often afraid that entire novels will fail just like that.
- 10. In what era do you wish you’d been born?
- Now is pretty good. I like birth control and air conditioning and indoor plumbing. And being able to answer any question immediately with the tiny computer in my portable phone. If not now, then ancient Egypt. I like their animal Gods.
- 11. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
- I need to stop saying “cocksucker” in that Richard Nixon inflection.
- 12. Which talent would you most like to have?
- If I were given talent credits to spend, I would probably put them all towards being a better writer. If this were not allowed, I would probably blow them towards a bunch of completely goofy things like being double-jointed or able to belch the national anthem.
- 13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- Marrying the only man in the world I could possibly be married to.
- 14. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- I like magnificent bastards who completely destroy people’s lives but are really witty about it, like Humbert Humbert and Tyler Durden.
- 15. How would you like to die?
- I was going to say mid-orgasm but then realized that it might be a bit traumatic for my partner. So, instead I’d like to request drifting off peacefully in a post-coital nap.
