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| photo: Margaret Pasulka | |
Brigid Pasulka is the author of A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which won the 2010 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Pasulka lives in Chicago with her husband and son and runs the writing center at a public high school. Her new novel is The Sun and Other Stars (Simon & Schuster, February 2014).
On your nightstand now:
Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg and Melinda Blau. Secrets of the Baby Whisperer saved my sanity the other day. Now, that's a powerful book.
Favorite book when you were a child:
It was a story: "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Won't-Pick-Up-Toys Cure" by Betty MacDonald. I was a very messy kid but loved the idea of everything being put back in its place.
Your top five authors:
There are so many authors I love, but I tend to gravitate toward those who subtly build up details until you feel enfolded in a completely new world. And I also like a good streak of dark humor--Flannery O'Connor, Salman Rushdie, Louis de Bernières, Kurt Vonnegut, Aravind Adiga.... But again, this is impossible to narrow down to just five.
Book you've faked reading:
I'm a full-time high-school teacher, so it's painfully obvious to me when someone hasn't read a book, and it's kind of a pet peeve of mine. In my own life, I long ago realized that once I've finished with my own writing, reading for school, and reading to research whichever novel I'm writing, I can't keep up with what everyone else has read. So I never fake it. I find it very freeing to say, "No, I haven't read that," and when once in a while someone (rude) follows up with, "I can't believe you've never read that!" I just turn it into a joke.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Dante's The Divine Comedy. There are so many people who only read the Inferno or only read a summary of the Inferno or only focus in on one small part out of context, and they come away thinking that Dante's all about punishment and retribution. But if you really commit to it and read through Purgatory and Paradise as well, you'll find that The Divine Comedy is about faith, hope, love and the utter inability of humans to accurately place judgment on one another.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. Nothing against Elijah Wood, but why would anyone buy [the film edition] over the wavy words? There have been many imitations of that cover since then, but none as striking.
Book that changed your life:
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I only read it for the first time about five years ago. It's another book that people misunderstand as being about censorship, when in fact, it's about self-censorship--the way we water down our words and therefore our thoughts, our expectations to be constantly entertained and the plague of our ever-shortening attention spans. It's uncanny how Bradbury predicted our society 60 years ago, and it's really made me reevaluate the choices I make in my daily life and writing.
Favorite line from a book:
Well, it's so overused and it's not really from a book, but a Flaubert quote--"Be regular and orderly in your life... so that you may be violent and original in your work."--is the maxim that's most helped me integrate my writing life with my real life.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Anne Frank's diary. It's one of the few books I can reread, and I read it in each language as I learn it, sort of as a personal final exam. But I remember that the first time I read it, I cried--from the content, yes, but also because this beautiful voice had been lost before its time.