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" Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.' "

Laura van den Berg

New York

American

Door

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" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "

" Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld. "

" A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially. "

" I love noir, quite obviously. "

" As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high. "

" 'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural. "

" I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. "

Laura van den Berg

I Am

Creating

" In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature. "

" When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers. "

" If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.' "

" If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before. "

" When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another. "

" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "

" Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger. "

" When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best. "

" The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different. "

" Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way. "

" Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths. "

" Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas. "

" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "

Laura van den Berg

Battle

Think

" I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. "

" Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation. "

" For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions. "

" Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there. "

Laura van den Berg

Anything Is Possible

Place

" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "

" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "

" In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life. "

" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "

" Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health. "

" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "