Sally's Exploration of Love in Literature

[Applause] okay Sally welcome thank you thank you welcome to Louisiana literature it's such a pleasure I would just tell everybody here that I'll be happy so science and these books I formally grant you permission to do that I think that's a great it is right okay so how are you very well thank you I'm people are in this room for me it's amazing to see so many people here thank you all so much for coming you know for a cultural institution this kind of audience is like solid gold normally people are 75 years older and there looks like people's great grandparents this is this is perfect and please stay forever all of you you know when I received the email with the invitation to interview Sally I knew of course that she was a [ __ ] she is a young literary star so I said yes of course by all means I didn't know how young actually 20 and at that time probably even younger so 27 yes exactly and and also I didn't know that you already did two books at the time because you just finished your second one it's out tomorrow okay two books and I also didn't know that it actually was her that I read a beautiful little essay in The New Yorker of last year but now I do I also quickly learned about the degree in American literature also the fact that you are editing a literary magazine yes which is called stinging fly exactly and I also found out that said Aruna is a skilled debater of any issue really you know a real fighter in debate contests so you could talk about any issue and you have you have been talking about any issue yes Ireland in Europe and you also want some big European contest yeah exactly you can so we could argue or discuss in I yes let's not put up with that right now you could pretend to be the expert or actually be the expert oh we definitely be pretending and we could talk about writing and about literary these are history about art politics religion or love what should we talk about do you think no do you think we should talk about love I think we should talk about love because your book here conversations with friends and also the new one which are read they are about love but I would like to ask you really is this a love story yes I actually I think it is um it's it's not necessarily a conventional love story but it's certainly about what it means to love someone or more than one someone and and it's it's not something that I set out to explore I didn't sit down one day and decide who I need to write a novel exploring the what it means to love and and the philosophical substance of what love feels like I didn't have any of this on my mind I sort of came up with these characters who we meet in the opening pages of the book and um and I wanted to know what would happen to them so I followed them through the narrative taking many many wrong turns along the way but eventually ending up with with this and but as I did that I suppose I found out that what interested me about these people's lives was love and and I don't mean love in a in a very conventional sort of romantic sense like you meet one person who you love and then you love them and that's the end of your love life it's concluded and you've loved someone so well done and it's sort of if I'm interested in all like you know familiar loves love between friends and love between siblings love obviously also between and romantic partners and you know and questioning what is what is that um the kind of love that's so central to our culture which is monogamous pair bonded love and it's sort of the it's seen as the epitome of what love really means um just trying to explore that why is that so central to our idea of what it means to be a human being and when we talk about the relationship between empathy and compassion and love is not the kind of love that we're talking about let's just to remind people I mean most of you of course read the book or will read the book tonight but but let's just remind people what this is about you're talking about love between different people we're talking about actually for different people so it's about Francis and Bobby yeah and what happens well I'm in this book we it it's narrated in the first person by a protagonist a young woman called Francis who's studying in in Dublin and her best friend who's also her ex-girlfriend Bobby and in the very opening pages of the book they mean a married couple who are like a young married couple but older than they are you know they're in their thirties and called Nick and Melissa and really the whole book is about exploring the that sort of rectangular dynamic those four points what are all the different connections that can spring up between them there's something almost mathematical about it like if I move one point how do all the other points move in response how do those dynamics shift and and it felt to me while I was writing it that I was just really interested in that every time I moved one I was interested to see how all the others moved and every time I sort of um plucked a string between two dynamics to hear all the other ones resonate it was just like an interesting process for me and I didn't know if it would ever interest any reader I didn't know if it would ever be interesting to anyone other than me so if will but it does interest the people in the booth because they are talking a lot and they're talking especially their protagonists Francis the main character and her friend Bobby are talking about love and there is this conversation they do have conversations in talking and face-to-face they also have a lot of conversations in writing their messaging on facebook or their texting and so on and and they're quite similar actually they don't change a lot whether they're writing or talking and that's very interesting but one of them in one of them Frances and Bobby are talking about about love and maybe we should just read that because I think that that's something we should talk about right and if you are Bobby yep she's she's also the most beautiful and I'm Francis of course yeah I never get to be Bobby yeah you know it's Francis kind of so I'm like her so okay you are Bobby and I'm her you go and this is a messaging message conversation and it's not one that actually happens during the book at this point in the book Francis is searching through her old instant messages with Bobby because she wants to sort of reconstruct an image of what their friendship was like before they met this married couple and everything started to get confusing so she goes through the instant messages and this is one of the conversations that she died in this case so I will read Bobby's lines if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon and try to understand it as a social value system it's both antithetical to capitalism in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness which dictates the whole logic of inequality that was four or five they're all different messages I haven't replied yet but I'm typing very quickly and and yet it's also subservient on facilitatory that is mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free yes capitalism harnesses love for profit yes love is the discursive practice and unpaid labor is the effect but I mean I get that I'm empty love as such that's that bad Francis if you have to do more than say you're anti things okay right this is the conversation and Francis says that sees empty love as such that's quite a statement isn't it it's something that she just says because it sounds right or does she feel that the autism is impossible for her well I think she does and I think in that in that context the conversation that they're having is about you know capitalist social structures and about the transactional nature of the way that you know our social world is structured now and also about how gender plays into that how women are expected to give much more of themselves in personal relationships than traditionally men have been expected to and so taking all those kind of very broad power dynamics into account I guess Francis just feels like so what's the point maybe it's all a lie I mean what is there maybe I don't want to give up myself autumn let me feel that that these people in your polka specially the two young women here that they have principles that guide their life their love life it has to inherit so certain principles in a way is that true is that how they is that how they go about it do you think I think that's how they would like to go about it I don't know that their principles are always successful but they would like do you think so would like to live by their principles I think I mean if you if you if you have principles they have to be able to encompass that if you have principles that you truly believe they have to be able to encompass the idea of human love and intimacy and if your principles can't then you're left with well it doesn't make sense for me it doesn't it doesn't make sense to give that much of myself to another person because it it's not part of the my ideology or my belief system it can't it can't accommodate that and and I think that's what Francis is feeling at that point but that conversation takes place before she meets these people who come to that in a second but so so when when writing about about well two young women's love life were you thinking also about how how people in that age actually go around relationships and love life and and and how did that connect with this writing you mean was I trying to observe something generationally there's something generationally here I it's so hard and to say that because I you know my experience of life has been so limited and I belong to the generation that I belong to and have never belonged to another one so it's it's really hard for me to say when I try and make a statement about Oh people my age feel this way well first of all a lot of people my age don't feel anything like what I feel and that's fine and but also it's quite possible that people you know 20 or 30 or 40 50 years older read this book and think oh yeah that's a little bit like what it was like for me too and then I don't I don't necessarily think that all these experiences are generationally specific some of the forms that the experiences take like the instant-message conversation like the idea of looking through your old instant messages and reading over them those are a little bit generationally specific that's something my parents would not have done anything I can do but does the does the overall feeling the experience on the level of feeling change that much it's just something I can't speak to I don't because I was I was struck by the way that they have all these principal conversations about how things should be not least their partner it has to in some way live up to certain principles and that sounds quite tough it sounds very tough so to go about life like that and of course Francis meet Nick and false I'm not sure if she falls in love but actually she feels something for him and of course that doesn't I mean I mean that's very unprincipled of her I mean it's a big [ __ ] cliche is a married man yeah she's the other woman it's I mean if you were a Marxist you could all which she probably claims so right you could read all kinds of power relations into that into that affair so so it must be very disappointing for her it is it is and I and I think also um it's as you say it's such a cliche so she becomes an archetype at this point she is the young ingenue she's the college student he's the he's not old he's like 32 but he's slightly older I need to go sir - my age quite different than I am - but um but but when you're 21 an age gap of 11 years can seem like a lot I'm sure and so in so many ways then it's it's she's engaging in a story which she has already heard she understands the archetypes that this story conforms to and actually I think that that prevents her from understanding what's really happening because she um sort of superimposes a familiar narrative on what's going on in her personal life that makes it easy for her to make sense those the other people in her life she knows the role that she's playing she's the other woman she's like the younger mistress and Nick is like the older man and Melissa sort of the betrayed wife who Frances sees is quite cold and and so all of that actually is not really what's happening that's not a very good description of what's happening and they think slowly as the novel progresses if I if I've done any just as to what I was trying to do she begins to see that those archetypes can't actually exhaust the complexity of she's very blase about it well in the beginning yeah yeah um but I think that it's a struggle for her to try and see past the kind of discourse the kind of cliches and archetypes that are so familiar to her particularly because she's a student of English so she's read all the novels about fairies to be to see the specificity of her own experience and of Nick's experience and as Melissa's and bobbies as well to get past the archetype and into something more complex yes can we just jump into literary history for a second because I mean this is your first novel and it is I mean I mean I mean you hesitated a little bit but it is I think it's a very good novel about love it really is and we get back we'll get back to it in a second but but of course I mean there had been one or two books before you about love yeah what is it what well they're what whatever what I mean what have inspir do you read love love stories yeah I mean I I of course I do and I think the the history of the novel is really a history of the love love story and I and I I mean I say that the only novel that I'm familiar with is really the tradition of the English novel I don't know so much about and the tradition of the novel in other languages and and it's something I would like to get to know more about certainly but in in the history of the English novel really and it coalesced as a form around the Marriage Plot like around the late 18th early 19th century when novels began to be really widely read and literacy improved hugely the novel form was different from the epics that had preceded it because it wasn't about Wars and it wasn't about national struggles it was about like who is this one woman going to marry this guy or the other guy and that was like the whole story of the novel and I mean and I mean that was what was new about it that was why it was called a novel and because it was a it was a form of storytelling that took place on a slightly different scale and in a different way in the English tradition anyway so I mean obviously that that's almost like the defining characteristic of the classic novel is that it involves marriages and and love stories Rocka really just to find the right yeah but also the question of whether there is such a thing as a right person and and I mean and so you start with Austin who obviously and it's so good at constructing those plots perfectly and but but they resolves themselves very neatly - and and in my opinion very satisfying Lee I love Jane Austen and and when I get to the end I believe that they are going to be happy together but I think probably for a critical reader you could say maybe there are some questions like are Darcy and Elizabeth really going to share a long happy untroubled life yes yes I like to think that did you read the sequence and then nightly definitely well but but Elizabeth and Darcy have questions but but but then you get obviously as the novel develops as why do you see why do you think there'd Elizabeth and Darcy will be unhappy oh I'm sure everyone has opinions about this but I think Darcy's characterization leads me to believe I mean in the beginning of the novel he's not a very nice man I mean because he hasn't met her yet well okay but that's that's kind this pedagogical idea of the romance story that you can you can that you can change each other's yeah that you can change each other morally which is which is nice to believe yeah but but I think but and maybe and maybe it is true I don't know that I believe that it's necessarily it's true for Emma so maybe it's also true for Darcy but it's it's a reversal of V of the ordinary gendered trope that we see in in those books but I mean as you move through the 19th century you get those stories become a little bit more complex and so novelists like George Eliot's later again novelists like is their specific love story that if I ask you what love story would you take with you to to an island without your boyfriend what is what is the love story oh dude I'm the story of me and my boyfriend and I yeah I mean that's the difficult one because the ones that have moved me most lately actually and I recently read for the first time portrait of a lady the Henry James novel and and that novel moved me a huge amount and it but but it's sad that you most of you probably already know that so I'm not spoiling it but it's it's a very sad novel and um Austen's love stories and happily and then and the later love stories of George Eliot in particularly of Henry James and and later again and sadly they don't resolve themselves into that shape that makes us feel satisfied at the end in the same way as earlier novels in that form do and so I wonder why that is I'm drawn lately I'm drawn to the ones that end on a sad note or that end with a feeling that maybe it's not possible it can't be reconciled in this extremely market-driven transactional society in this very patriarchal social form it's not it can't be done you guys why are you drawn to those I wish I knew I don't know and I don't think that I'm all that pessimistic about the possibilities of redemption and you know even in this political mess that we find ourselves in but but i but lately those are the books that I've been reading and I don't know why we're talking about that maybe this year do they ask you if you're writing a book a year so you're coming back yeah what what I thought about when I was the first part of this book it was I was worried that that all the four people there and also the people they are talking to there's a lot of people you know in their in their big room actually they'd love to them was a cat was only about self-realization is that is that so is that what they thought is that because it's it's all it seems like being about themselves and about how people react to them yeah or how they react to people and not about the relationship yeah and that's it's something that I um that I was definitely interested in on a political level when I when I started thinking about um political structures and that sort of dominate the world around me when I was in my teens I was coming out of from a feminist perspective um I think because I was just so in my own self and that was that those were the struggles that seemed to actually touch on my life in some way and I couldn't see outside that at all and I'm obviously still just beginning to struggle to try and see outside my own I have my own life and existence but certainly approaching it through that paradigm and I was I was attached to ideas about independence and and female agency like the idea of the individual woman being sort of a sacrosanct a munis and that nothing should ever violate that unit and that it was an independent unit that could move through the world and sort of complete within itself and that seemed to me like a principle of feminist philosophy that sort of individuality for the woman was very significant and there must be some dangers to that when yes entering yeah no yes or or any serious human engagement romantic love or any kind of loves okay let me just stop you there because I will now do something that is Tory quite unconventional but you Irish so are you used to that I don't know why I said that but-but-but I will ask you to to read the end of the book it's a total spoiler we're now actually so so I so any of you who have not read the book think about if something else I said okay no no no don't ask that you're going to do that because the end is amazing and it doesn't really matter that you know here you can read it anyhow okay and and tell us what happened I mean Nick and Frances the two main characters who have been together for a long time it's very turbulent they are they in the relationship and months go by yeah and suddenly Frances phone rings yes and what happens um so they as you say haven't spoken in months her her phone rings she's going Christmas shopping and it's and it's Nick who she hasn't heard from in a long time and they've been having an affair and then the affair has ended so um she picks up the phone and he has called her accidentally and he was supposed to call his wife but he rang her number by accident and and he thinks that he's speaking to his wife who's in the supermarket so he's he's in the supermarket so he's saying something boring about groceries and Frances has to tell him it's me it's not your wife it's the other one and so he's obviously I'm embarrassed and and she's embarrassed but but the conversation continues a long time for a long time yes yes so they have a long phone conversation she's wandering around a bookshop and she's distracted she's wandering down Dawson Street and Dublin's Ward st. Stephen the thing is that she hasn't been talking or thinking about her him for a long time yeah many many pages without him he was in the book yeah okay okay then they talk like this so I'm just going to I'm just going to read the very very end of this conversation and I've been instructed you he made these making me do it so I'm sorry if if any of you don't want to hear this it's just yes yeah yes there's another book coming out tomorrow exactly I won't spoil that one so they've been talking for a long time at this point and she's now and she realizes that he's actually in the city center she's in the city center as well he's in the supermarket and she's on st. Stephen's screen as I got closer to the gauge I heard the bell ringing the noise of traffic opened up again like a light getting brighter and brighter does it have to be complicated I said yeah I think so there's the thing with Bobby which is important to me you're telling me he said I'm married it's always going to be [ __ ] up like this isn't it but I'll compliment you more this time I was at the gate I wanted to tell him about the church that was a different conversation I wanted things from him that would make everything else complicated like what kind of compliment I said I have one that's not really a compliment but I think you'll like it okay tell me remember the first time we kissed he said at the party and I said I didn't think the utility room was a good place to be kissing and we left you know I went up to my room and waited for you right I mean for hours and at first I really thought you would come it was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying because even if you did come upstairs what then the house was full of people it's not like anything was going to happen but every time I thought of going back down again I would imagine hearing you on the stairs and I couldn't leave I mean I physically couldn't anyway how I felt then knowing that you were close by and feeling completely paralyzed by it this phone call is very similar if I told you where my car is right now I don't think I'd be able to leave I think I would have to stay here just in case you changed your mind about everything you know I still have that impulse to be available to you you'll notice I didn't buy anything in the supermarket I closed my eyes things and people moved around me taking positions in obscure hierarchies participating in systems I didn't know about and never would a complex network of objects and concepts you live through certain things before you understand them you can't always take the analytical position come and get me I said yes yes come and get me this is the last sentence in the book and it's so liberating because it makes everything in the book makes sense and I just feel like reading it all over again in that light mm-hmm because it's very surprising did you what did this end surprise you - yeah it was the last scene in the book that I wrote and I had been struggling with the ending for a long time and you know if if any of you have read any of the book really or even or even listened to was talking about it and there's obviously a lot of different ways that could go there are several different relationships in play which of them are going to be sustained which of them are going to end who is gonna hate each other by the end of the book and and I feel like when I was writing it I tried basically every possible outcome I did the one where they never see each other again and I did the one where she and Bobby don't see each other again and I Danny and it was so much longer and then it was so much shorter and I just couldn't get it right and then one day I sat down and and it was almost like I realized I don't have to it was like the opposite of what you say it was like I don't have to make everything make sense I don't have to go through every element of the book that I've introduced and make sure that everything is ticked off and everything has tied up together and everyone understands and and with that in mind with that feeling of kind of looseness i sat down and wrote this scene and starting in in if any of you know Dublin starting at the bottom of Dawson Street and going up Dawson Street into st. Stephen's Green around and then into one of the benches and and it was like moving with Francis as I did that I felt like I was ein and I know that walks very well walking walking and I and as they were talking I understood oh this is I'm finishing my book now I'm gonna finish my book and then I wrote the last sentence and I was like from the beginning I didn't even know from halfway through or two-thirds of the way through or five six of the way so it's almost you know how I mean you'reyou're it's a weird to say crazy it's a big thing to know about the book that you actually have been reading that that you didn't know where it was going to we have entered some whales could have ended anywhere else oh it couldn't because he couldn't well no this obviously could not her the book that I was writing could have yeah I mean there's so much of a difference when when you were the one who has written the book there's such a big difference between the living text you're still working on and taking chunks out of and putting chunks back into moving stuff around and and this like item which is a product that people can purchase yes and it's like so difficult to make them fit together because one of them is like the this thing that I lived with for such a long time I was making little changes than I was making big changes and I was looking at the word count and and this is like not that it's something else and I don't know what it is but it also is also a very another point to this apart from these two people actually to their own surprise loving each other like this is there also a point so so that that love in the way that they have been pretending cannot be shared between three four five six people that love is you know it's if you do the math it equals two yeah I don't know I don't I don't think that that was I don't think that that is the case for these characters I don't think it is I don't think it is I'm gonna have to disagree with you there i I don't I don't think that it is because I think I first of all think that Nick is gonna remain married I don't think he's going to leave his wife and I don't think that Francis and Bobby are going to part ways I think that it's going to stay a very complicated situation and that's not me trying to make a didactic statement about monogamy or anything like that it's just true it was just trying to let myself live with the complexities and not fence everything off at the end and put everyone back in couples again because it just felt like that was just easy I maybe I agree he might not actually leave his wife yeah sure Yeah right but that doesn't mean really matter it's like the tacit discussion just that doesn't really matter the question that I mean the last sentence is come and get me I mean that's that's that's offensive right and that's on and that's undividable that's on shareable that's between the two of them and what I feel there is that that the liberation the liberating part of it is that it feels like so that that that in a few pages it turns around and concludes that you can change each other which you sit before that you are not sure no I do believe I do believe that people can change I believe people don't have any choice but to change each other there is no you without others I mean there's no version of yourself that isn't constantly influenced by everybody else in your life I mean even the fact that we use language is obviously it's a human invention and we got it from other people we didn't invent it for ourselves so everything we know about ourselves comes from other people telling us and showing us and so I don't believe there's any such thing as the the individual unit that just moves through the world unaffected by others are also because it reflects in language doesn't it I mean when they have this conversation about Marxism and the power power in relationships and so on I mean it's a totally different language than the real language of love between two people I mean a Marxist analysis between Bobby and Francis doesn't sounds like come and get me no it's totally different yeah but I mean yeah because I think it's always difficult to make the language of theory and whether that's Marxist theory or its philosophy or you know any any any language that we use to try and explain human experience on an analytical or conceptual level whatever you're drawn to whether it's Marxism or feminism or it's nonpolar or it's not political it's philosophical theory and it's always so hard to make that idea make sense in your everyday very mundane life or in your intimate personal relationships how do you apply that theory how do you bring that down to that level or or bring or bring it up to that level um so that for me is something very interesting it's something that I'm interested in following like a thread through my work is like how do I take the ideas and beliefs and principles like we spoke about that I believed to be true and makes sense of them not in a broad social or political way but in the very miniature way of people's intimate lives and of love stories how can I love story be Marxist well I don't know the answer to that question and maybe it doesn't have an answer but I'm interested in asking but an office-boy cannot be Marxist chemist yeah I think it can yeah I think you can I'm figuring it out next book we'll see but I mean I think it can yeah yeah well then it has to be revolutionary Marxism yeah it has to be only kind yes yeah yeah your second book right starts with with with there we have six more minutes now okay we have to do this properly you know the last is the second book which is out is it actually tomorrow Monday or do you think you don't know okay it starts with we can't talk too much now about what it's about and we shouldn't because we spoiled the whole your first book now but but there's a quote in the beginning from George Eliot who you mentioned before just remind us earlier this oh and it's George Eliot was a British novelist in 19th century novelist famous for writing Middlemarch George Eliot was a pen name she was a female novelist and and also wrote the novel Daniel Deronda which has given me the epigraph for my for my second book yes and there is this you have to listen carefully now because it's it's a bit difficult English but but please read this quote that you start your second book with it is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion but to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence subduing them into receptiveness did you get it all of you what I'm still not sure I get it what it mean what it says in short is that it is it is one of the big secrets of of human mentality or or you know the way people think and behave is that you can't really change in any way convert is the word here before you touch someone else that influence really influences you yeah I mean in this this court could not have started your first book because that then I would have known that I was I should be ready for a real love story yeah but this one starts your second no is this them a love story from the beginning yes the second book is definitely a lot I love story from the beginning and it's I mean I think in the in the first book there's sort of a some of the tension is generated by not quite knowing whether these characters really should be together or not and I think in the second book I'm we meet the characters when they're sort of 17 or 18 and we followed them over the course of a few years for years and I think we probably always know that they love each other very much but we just don't know I just didn't know when I was writing it what does that mean when in you know in in the social world that they inhabit in their personalities in the in their different positions in a class system and their different relationships with gender what does it mean to say that you love another person what are you saying when you say that and and so that was the question that I wanted to answer I didn't wasn't trying to make a mystery of whether they loved each other or not I was trying to explore what it would actually mean to love another person and obviously the quote is um it's about how people can change each other as you say and about how sometimes nothing can change you until someone does and that that you know people are waiting almost waiting to be influenced by one person we believe that is very opposite of what everybody goes around telling each other right people says the opposite you can only you can change yourself yeah I don't believe that at all and I mean I think I don't believe that at all and I also don't believe this sort of like everyone should be very self-sufficient and you don't need anyone else to love you you just need yourself to love you I think that's nonsense I mean of course we're all connected in a in a network of human relationships all the time which sustain us I mean people are out in fields picking crops so we can eat people are making clothing that we have to wear so the idea that you you can move through the world as a self-sustaining individual is it's a fiction it's it's a it's a delusion really and so I don't know how that can apply interpersonally by which I don't mean to suggest everyone has to find one person and get married at a certain age or ever um but the human relationships are very important they're very sustaining whatever form they take they don't need to be conventional they can be very unconventional but but they're not just optional you can't just opt out of the rest of humankind and I don't I don't believe that and I do find it a little bit strange that as you say that there's this vogue for saying well it's all about yourself now you have to be the one to love yourself and you have to be the one to change yourself because I don't necessarily believe that that's possible right are you are you I as a writer when you talked before that you were not totally optimistic about the relationship ending in a positive way whether being Darcy or or Nick and Francis or maybe even these two here because they are in your new book they are also trying to get away from each other in a way and they can't really yeah I mean it's it's it's like they're trying to not so get together and are you as a writer a bit pessimistic or are you as a person a bit dismissed thing about you know romantic happy-ever-after love stories no I would say I'm extremely optimistic and I think I'm almost naively optimistic about I think the ability of human beings to love one another and I am NOT you know I really like people I don't have that sense of feeling disgusted with human society or feeling like I mean I'm disgusted with a lot of aspects of human society but I'm never disgusted with people that I meet I really like people and so um when I write about people's intimate relationships I can't help that I feel there must be some chance for us to even though the obstacles may be very serious and may be very difficult to overcome I can't believe that they're impossible to overcome I have to believe that it's it is possible even not at not at every moment not in every situation but that it has to be you know for me to carry on living and to retain my sanity in this world I have to believe that's possible so I think that that belief definitely comes across with my words that also part of your writing yeah to keep that yeah definitely yeah I couldn't I couldn't do what I do if I didn't believe that yeah [Applause]

[Applause] okay Sally welcome thank you thank you welcome to Louisiana literature it's such a pleasure I would just tell everybody here that I'll be happy so science and these books I formally grant you permission to do that I think that's a great it is right okay so how are you very well thank you I'm people are in this room for me it's amazing to see so many people here thank you all so much for coming you know for a cultural institution this kind of audience is like solid gold normally people are 75 years older and there looks like people's great grandparents this is this is perfect and please stay forever all of you you know when I received the email with the invitation to interview Sally I knew of course that she was a [ __ ] she is a young literary star so I said yes of course by all means I didn't know how young actually 20 and at that time probably even younger so 27 yes exactly and and also I didn't know that you already did two books at the time because you just finished your second one it's out tomorrow okay two books and I also didn't know that it actually was her that I read a beautiful little essay in The New Yorker of last year but now I do I also quickly learned about the degree in American literature also the fact that you are editing a literary magazine yes which is called stinging fly exactly and I also found out that said Aruna is a skilled debater of any issue really you know a real fighter in debate contests so you could talk about any issue and you have you have been talking about any issue yes Ireland in Europe and you also want some big European contest yeah exactly you can so we could argue or discuss in I yes let's not put up with that right now you could pretend to be the expert or actually be the expert oh we definitely be pretending and we could talk about writing and about literary these are history about art politics religion or love what should we talk about do you think no do you think we should talk about love I think we should talk about love because your book here conversations with friends and also the new one which are read they are about love but I would like to ask you really is this a love story yes I actually I think it is um it's it's not necessarily a conventional love story but it's certainly about what it means to love someone or more than one someone and and it's it's not something that I set out to explore I didn't sit down one day and decide who I need to write a novel exploring the what it means to love and and the philosophical substance of what love feels like I didn't have any of this on my mind I sort of came up with these characters who we meet in the opening pages of the book and um and I wanted to know what would happen to them so I followed them through the narrative taking many many wrong turns along the way but eventually ending up with with this and but as I did that I suppose I found out that what interested me about these people's lives was love and and I don't mean love in a in a very conventional sort of romantic sense like you meet one person who you love and then you love them and that's the end of your love life it's concluded and you've loved someone so well done and it's sort of if I'm interested in all like you know familiar loves love between friends and love between siblings love obviously also between and romantic partners and you know and questioning what is what is that um the kind of love that's so central to our culture which is monogamous pair bonded love and it's sort of the it's seen as the epitome of what love really means um just trying to explore that why is that so central to our idea of what it means to be a human being and when we talk about the relationship between empathy and compassion and love is not the kind of love that we're talking about let's just to remind people I mean most of you of course read the book or will read the book tonight but but let's just remind people what this is about you're talking about love between different people we're talking about actually for different people so it's about Francis and Bobby yeah and what happens well I'm in this book we it it's narrated in the first person by a protagonist a young woman called Francis who's studying in in Dublin and her best friend who's also her ex-girlfriend Bobby and in the very opening pages of the book they mean a married couple who are like a young married couple but older than they are you know they're in their thirties and called Nick and Melissa and really the whole book is about exploring the that sort of rectangular dynamic those four points what are all the different connections that can spring up between them there's something almost mathematical about it like if I move one point how do all the other points move in response how do those dynamics shift and and it felt to me while I was writing it that I was just really interested in that every time I moved one I was interested to see how all the others moved and every time I sort of um plucked a string between two dynamics to hear all the other ones resonate it was just like an interesting process for me and I didn't know if it would ever interest any reader I didn't know if it would ever be interesting to anyone other than me so if will but it does interest the people in the booth because they are talking a lot and they're talking especially their protagonists Francis the main character and her friend Bobby are talking about love and there is this conversation they do have conversations in talking and face-to-face they also have a lot of conversations in writing their messaging on facebook or their texting and so on and and they're quite similar actually they don't change a lot whether they're writing or talking and that's very interesting but one of them in one of them Frances and Bobby are talking about about love and maybe we should just read that because I think that that's something we should talk about right and if you are Bobby yep she's she's also the most beautiful and I'm Francis of course yeah I never get to be Bobby yeah you know it's Francis kind of so I'm like her so okay you are Bobby and I'm her you go and this is a messaging message conversation and it's not one that actually happens during the book at this point in the book Francis is searching through her old instant messages with Bobby because she wants to sort of reconstruct an image of what their friendship was like before they met this married couple and everything started to get confusing so she goes through the instant messages and this is one of the conversations that she died in this case so I will read Bobby's lines if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon and try to understand it as a social value system it's both antithetical to capitalism in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness which dictates the whole logic of inequality that was four or five they're all different messages I haven't replied yet but I'm typing very quickly and and yet it's also subservient on facilitatory that is mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free yes capitalism harnesses love for profit yes love is the discursive practice and unpaid labor is the effect but I mean I get that I'm empty love as such that's that bad Francis if you have to do more than say you're anti things okay right this is the conversation and Francis says that sees empty love as such that's quite a statement isn't it it's something that she just says because it sounds right or does she feel that the autism is impossible for her well I think she does and I think in that in that context the conversation that they're having is about you know capitalist social structures and about the transactional nature of the way that you know our social world is structured now and also about how gender plays into that how women are expected to give much more of themselves in personal relationships than traditionally men have been expected to and so taking all those kind of very broad power dynamics into account I guess Francis just feels like so what's the point maybe it's all a lie I mean what is there maybe I don't want to give up myself autumn let me feel that that these people in your polka specially the two young women here that they have principles that guide their life their love life it has to inherit so certain principles in a way is that true is that how they is that how they go about it do you think I think that's how they would like to go about it I don't know that their principles are always successful but they would like do you think so would like to live by their principles I think I mean if you if you if you have principles they have to be able to encompass that if you have principles that you truly believe they have to be able to encompass the idea of human love and intimacy and if your principles can't then you're left with well it doesn't make sense for me it doesn't it doesn't make sense to give that much of myself to another person because it it's not part of the my ideology or my belief system it can't it can't accommodate that and and I think that's what Francis is feeling at that point but that conversation takes place before she meets these people who come to that in a second but so so when when writing about about well two young women's love life were you thinking also about how how people in that age actually go around relationships and love life and and and how did that connect with this writing you mean was I trying to observe something generationally there's something generationally here I it's so hard and to say that because I you know my experience of life has been so limited and I belong to the generation that I belong to and have never belonged to another one so it's it's really hard for me to say when I try and make a statement about Oh people my age feel this way well first of all a lot of people my age don't feel anything like what I feel and that's fine and but also it's quite possible that people you know 20 or 30 or 40 50 years older read this book and think oh yeah that's a little bit like what it was like for me too and then I don't I don't necessarily think that all these experiences are generationally specific some of the forms that the experiences take like the instant-message conversation like the idea of looking through your old instant messages and reading over them those are a little bit generationally specific that's something my parents would not have done anything I can do but does the does the overall feeling the experience on the level of feeling change that much it's just something I can't speak to I don't because I was I was struck by the way that they have all these principal conversations about how things should be not least their partner it has to in some way live up to certain principles and that sounds quite tough it sounds very tough so to go about life like that and of course Francis meet Nick and false I'm not sure if she falls in love but actually she feels something for him and of course that doesn't I mean I mean that's very unprincipled of her I mean it's a big [ __ ] cliche is a married man yeah she's the other woman it's I mean if you were a Marxist you could all which she probably claims so right you could read all kinds of power relations into that into that affair so so it must be very disappointing for her it is it is and I and I think also um it's as you say it's such a cliche so she becomes an archetype at this point she is the young ingenue she's the college student he's the he's not old he's like 32 but he's slightly older I need to go sir - my age quite different than I am - but um but but when you're 21 an age gap of 11 years can seem like a lot I'm sure and so in so many ways then it's it's she's engaging in a story which she has already heard she understands the archetypes that this story conforms to and actually I think that that prevents her from understanding what's really happening because she um sort of superimposes a familiar narrative on what's going on in her personal life that makes it easy for her to make sense those the other people in her life she knows the role that she's playing she's the other woman she's like the younger mistress and Nick is like the older man and Melissa sort of the betrayed wife who Frances sees is quite cold and and so all of that actually is not really what's happening that's not a very good description of what's happening and they think slowly as the novel progresses if I if I've done any just as to what I was trying to do she begins to see that those archetypes can't actually exhaust the complexity of she's very blase about it well in the beginning yeah yeah um but I think that it's a struggle for her to try and see past the kind of discourse the kind of cliches and archetypes that are so familiar to her particularly because she's a student of English so she's read all the novels about fairies to be to see the specificity of her own experience and of Nick's experience and as Melissa's and bobbies as well to get past the archetype and into something more complex yes can we just jump into literary history for a second because I mean this is your first novel and it is I mean I mean I mean you hesitated a little bit but it is I think it's a very good novel about love it really is and we get back we'll get back to it in a second but but of course I mean there had been one or two books before you about love yeah what is it what well they're what whatever what I mean what have inspir do you read love love stories yeah I mean I I of course I do and I think the the history of the novel is really a history of the love love story and I and I I mean I say that the only novel that I'm familiar with is really the tradition of the English novel I don't know so much about and the tradition of the novel in other languages and and it's something I would like to get to know more about certainly but in in the history of the English novel really and it coalesced as a form around the Marriage Plot like around the late 18th early 19th century when novels began to be really widely read and literacy improved hugely the novel form was different from the epics that had preceded it because it wasn't about Wars and it wasn't about national struggles it was about like who is this one woman going to marry this guy or the other guy and that was like the whole story of the novel and I mean and I mean that was what was new about it that was why it was called a novel and because it was a it was a form of storytelling that took place on a slightly different scale and in a different way in the English tradition anyway so I mean obviously that that's almost like the defining characteristic of the classic novel is that it involves marriages and and love stories Rocka really just to find the right yeah but also the question of whether there is such a thing as a right person and and I mean and so you start with Austin who obviously and it's so good at constructing those plots perfectly and but but they resolves themselves very neatly - and and in my opinion very satisfying Lee I love Jane Austen and and when I get to the end I believe that they are going to be happy together but I think probably for a critical reader you could say maybe there are some questions like are Darcy and Elizabeth really going to share a long happy untroubled life yes yes I like to think that did you read the sequence and then nightly definitely well but but Elizabeth and Darcy have questions but but but then you get obviously as the novel develops as why do you see why do you think there'd Elizabeth and Darcy will be unhappy oh I'm sure everyone has opinions about this but I think Darcy's characterization leads me to believe I mean in the beginning of the novel he's not a very nice man I mean because he hasn't met her yet well okay but that's that's kind this pedagogical idea of the romance story that you can you can that you can change each other's yeah that you can change each other morally which is which is nice to believe yeah but but I think but and maybe and maybe it is true I don't know that I believe that it's necessarily it's true for Emma so maybe it's also true for Darcy but it's it's a reversal of V of the ordinary gendered trope that we see in in those books but I mean as you move through the 19th century you get those stories become a little bit more complex and so novelists like George Eliot's later again novelists like is their specific love story that if I ask you what love story would you take with you to to an island without your boyfriend what is what is the love story oh dude I'm the story of me and my boyfriend and I yeah I mean that's the difficult one because the ones that have moved me most lately actually and I recently read for the first time portrait of a lady the Henry James novel and and that novel moved me a huge amount and it but but it's sad that you most of you probably already know that so I'm not spoiling it but it's it's a very sad novel and um Austen's love stories and happily and then and the later love stories of George Eliot in particularly of Henry James and and later again and sadly they don't resolve themselves into that shape that makes us feel satisfied at the end in the same way as earlier novels in that form do and so I wonder why that is I'm drawn lately I'm drawn to the ones that end on a sad note or that end with a feeling that maybe it's not possible it can't be reconciled in this extremely market-driven transactional society in this very patriarchal social form it's not it can't be done you guys why are you drawn to those I wish I knew I don't know and I don't think that I'm all that pessimistic about the possibilities of redemption and you know even in this political mess that we find ourselves in but but i but lately those are the books that I've been reading and I don't know why we're talking about that maybe this year do they ask you if you're writing a book a year so you're coming back yeah what what I thought about when I was the first part of this book it was I was worried that that all the four people there and also the people they are talking to there's a lot of people you know in their in their big room actually they'd love to them was a cat was only about self-realization is that is that so is that what they thought is that because it's it's all it seems like being about themselves and about how people react to them yeah or how they react to people and not about the relationship yeah and that's it's something that I um that I was definitely interested in on a political level when I when I started thinking about um political structures and that sort of dominate the world around me when I was in my teens I was coming out of from a feminist perspective um I think because I was just so in my own self and that was that those were the struggles that seemed to actually touch on my life in some way and I couldn't see outside that at all and I'm obviously still just beginning to struggle to try and see outside my own I have my own life and existence but certainly approaching it through that paradigm and I was I was attached to ideas about independence and and female agency like the idea of the individual woman being sort of a sacrosanct a munis and that nothing should ever violate that unit and that it was an independent unit that could move through the world and sort of complete within itself and that seemed to me like a principle of feminist philosophy that sort of individuality for the woman was very significant and there must be some dangers to that when yes entering yeah no yes or or any serious human engagement romantic love or any kind of loves okay let me just stop you there because I will now do something that is Tory quite unconventional but you Irish so are you used to that I don't know why I said that but-but-but I will ask you to to read the end of the book it's a total spoiler we're now actually so so I so any of you who have not read the book think about if something else I said okay no no no don't ask that you're going to do that because the end is amazing and it doesn't really matter that you know here you can read it anyhow okay and and tell us what happened I mean Nick and Frances the two main characters who have been together for a long time it's very turbulent they are they in the relationship and months go by yeah and suddenly Frances phone rings yes and what happens um so they as you say haven't spoken in months her her phone rings she's going Christmas shopping and it's and it's Nick who she hasn't heard from in a long time and they've been having an affair and then the affair has ended so um she picks up the phone and he has called her accidentally and he was supposed to call his wife but he rang her number by accident and and he thinks that he's speaking to his wife who's in the supermarket so he's he's in the supermarket so he's saying something boring about groceries and Frances has to tell him it's me it's not your wife it's the other one and so he's obviously I'm embarrassed and and she's embarrassed but but the conversation continues a long time for a long time yes yes so they have a long phone conversation she's wandering around a bookshop and she's distracted she's wandering down Dawson Street and Dublin's Ward st. Stephen the thing is that she hasn't been talking or thinking about her him for a long time yeah many many pages without him he was in the book yeah okay okay then they talk like this so I'm just going to I'm just going to read the very very end of this conversation and I've been instructed you he made these making me do it so I'm sorry if if any of you don't want to hear this it's just yes yeah yes there's another book coming out tomorrow exactly I won't spoil that one so they've been talking for a long time at this point and she's now and she realizes that he's actually in the city center she's in the city center as well he's in the supermarket and she's on st. Stephen's screen as I got closer to the gauge I heard the bell ringing the noise of traffic opened up again like a light getting brighter and brighter does it have to be complicated I said yeah I think so there's the thing with Bobby which is important to me you're telling me he said I'm married it's always going to be [ __ ] up like this isn't it but I'll compliment you more this time I was at the gate I wanted to tell him about the church that was a different conversation I wanted things from him that would make everything else complicated like what kind of compliment I said I have one that's not really a compliment but I think you'll like it okay tell me remember the first time we kissed he said at the party and I said I didn't think the utility room was a good place to be kissing and we left you know I went up to my room and waited for you right I mean for hours and at first I really thought you would come it was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying because even if you did come upstairs what then the house was full of people it's not like anything was going to happen but every time I thought of going back down again I would imagine hearing you on the stairs and I couldn't leave I mean I physically couldn't anyway how I felt then knowing that you were close by and feeling completely paralyzed by it this phone call is very similar if I told you where my car is right now I don't think I'd be able to leave I think I would have to stay here just in case you changed your mind about everything you know I still have that impulse to be available to you you'll notice I didn't buy anything in the supermarket I closed my eyes things and people moved around me taking positions in obscure hierarchies participating in systems I didn't know about and never would a complex network of objects and concepts you live through certain things before you understand them you can't always take the analytical position come and get me I said yes yes come and get me this is the last sentence in the book and it's so liberating because it makes everything in the book makes sense and I just feel like reading it all over again in that light mm-hmm because it's very surprising did you what did this end surprise you - yeah it was the last scene in the book that I wrote and I had been struggling with the ending for a long time and you know if if any of you have read any of the book really or even or even listened to was talking about it and there's obviously a lot of different ways that could go there are several different relationships in play which of them are going to be sustained which of them are going to end who is gonna hate each other by the end of the book and and I feel like when I was writing it I tried basically every possible outcome I did the one where they never see each other again and I did the one where she and Bobby don't see each other again and I Danny and it was so much longer and then it was so much shorter and I just couldn't get it right and then one day I sat down and and it was almost like I realized I don't have to it was like the opposite of what you say it was like I don't have to make everything make sense I don't have to go through every element of the book that I've introduced and make sure that everything is ticked off and everything has tied up together and everyone understands and and with that in mind with that feeling of kind of looseness i sat down and wrote this scene and starting in in if any of you know Dublin starting at the bottom of Dawson Street and going up Dawson Street into st. Stephen's Green around and then into one of the benches and and it was like moving with Francis as I did that I felt like I was ein and I know that walks very well walking walking and I and as they were talking I understood oh this is I'm finishing my book now I'm gonna finish my book and then I wrote the last sentence and I was like from the beginning I didn't even know from halfway through or two-thirds of the way through or five six of the way so it's almost you know how I mean you'reyou're it's a weird to say crazy it's a big thing to know about the book that you actually have been reading that that you didn't know where it was going to we have entered some whales could have ended anywhere else oh it couldn't because he couldn't well no this obviously could not her the book that I was writing could have yeah I mean there's so much of a difference when when you were the one who has written the book there's such a big difference between the living text you're still working on and taking chunks out of and putting chunks back into moving stuff around and and this like item which is a product that people can purchase yes and it's like so difficult to make them fit together because one of them is like the this thing that I lived with for such a long time I was making little changes than I was making big changes and I was looking at the word count and and this is like not that it's something else and I don't know what it is but it also is also a very another point to this apart from these two people actually to their own surprise loving each other like this is there also a point so so that that love in the way that they have been pretending cannot be shared between three four five six people that love is you know it's if you do the math it equals two yeah I don't know I don't I don't think that that was I don't think that that is the case for these characters I don't think it is I don't think it is I'm gonna have to disagree with you there i I don't I don't think that it is because I think I first of all think that Nick is gonna remain married I don't think he's going to leave his wife and I don't think that Francis and Bobby are going to part ways I think that it's going to stay a very complicated situation and that's not me trying to make a didactic statement about monogamy or anything like that it's just true it was just trying to let myself live with the complexities and not fence everything off at the end and put everyone back in couples again because it just felt like that was just easy I maybe I agree he might not actually leave his wife yeah sure Yeah right but that doesn't mean really matter it's like the tacit discussion just that doesn't really matter the question that I mean the last sentence is come and get me I mean that's that's that's offensive right and that's on and that's undividable that's on shareable that's between the two of them and what I feel there is that that the liberation the liberating part of it is that it feels like so that that that in a few pages it turns around and concludes that you can change each other which you sit before that you are not sure no I do believe I do believe that people can change I believe people don't have any choice but to change each other there is no you without others I mean there's no version of yourself that isn't constantly influenced by everybody else in your life I mean even the fact that we use language is obviously it's a human invention and we got it from other people we didn't invent it for ourselves so everything we know about ourselves comes from other people telling us and showing us and so I don't believe there's any such thing as the the individual unit that just moves through the world unaffected by others are also because it reflects in language doesn't it I mean when they have this conversation about Marxism and the power power in relationships and so on I mean it's a totally different language than the real language of love between two people I mean a Marxist analysis between Bobby and Francis doesn't sounds like come and get me no it's totally different yeah but I mean yeah because I think it's always difficult to make the language of theory and whether that's Marxist theory or its philosophy or you know any any any language that we use to try and explain human experience on an analytical or conceptual level whatever you're drawn to whether it's Marxism or feminism or it's nonpolar or it's not political it's philosophical theory and it's always so hard to make that idea make sense in your everyday very mundane life or in your intimate personal relationships how do you apply that theory how do you bring that down to that level or or bring or bring it up to that level um so that for me is something very interesting it's something that I'm interested in following like a thread through my work is like how do I take the ideas and beliefs and principles like we spoke about that I believed to be true and makes sense of them not in a broad social or political way but in the very miniature way of people's intimate lives and of love stories how can I love story be Marxist well I don't know the answer to that question and maybe it doesn't have an answer but I'm interested in asking but an office-boy cannot be Marxist chemist yeah I think it can yeah I think you can I'm figuring it out next book we'll see but I mean I think it can yeah yeah well then it has to be revolutionary Marxism yeah it has to be only kind yes yeah yeah your second book right starts with with with there we have six more minutes now okay we have to do this properly you know the last is the second book which is out is it actually tomorrow Monday or do you think you don't know okay it starts with we can't talk too much now about what it's about and we shouldn't because we spoiled the whole your first book now but but there's a quote in the beginning from George Eliot who you mentioned before just remind us earlier this oh and it's George Eliot was a British novelist in 19th century novelist famous for writing Middlemarch George Eliot was a pen name she was a female novelist and and also wrote the novel Daniel Deronda which has given me the epigraph for my for my second book yes and there is this you have to listen carefully now because it's it's a bit difficult English but but please read this quote that you start your second book with it is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion but to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence subduing them into receptiveness did you get it all of you what I'm still not sure I get it what it mean what it says in short is that it is it is one of the big secrets of of human mentality or or you know the way people think and behave is that you can't really change in any way convert is the word here before you touch someone else that influence really influences you yeah I mean in this this court could not have started your first book because that then I would have known that I was I should be ready for a real love story yeah but this one starts your second no is this them a love story from the beginning yes the second book is definitely a lot I love story from the beginning and it's I mean I think in the in the first book there's sort of a some of the tension is generated by not quite knowing whether these characters really should be together or not and I think in the second book I'm we meet the characters when they're sort of 17 or 18 and we followed them over the course of a few years for years and I think we probably always know that they love each other very much but we just don't know I just didn't know when I was writing it what does that mean when in you know in in the social world that they inhabit in their personalities in the in their different positions in a class system and their different relationships with gender what does it mean to say that you love another person what are you saying when you say that and and so that was the question that I wanted to answer I didn't wasn't trying to make a mystery of whether they loved each other or not I was trying to explore what it would actually mean to love another person and obviously the quote is um it's about how people can change each other as you say and about how sometimes nothing can change you until someone does and that that you know people are waiting almost waiting to be influenced by one person we believe that is very opposite of what everybody goes around telling each other right people says the opposite you can only you can change yourself yeah I don't believe that at all and I mean I think I don't believe that at all and I also don't believe this sort of like everyone should be very self-sufficient and you don't need anyone else to love you you just need yourself to love you I think that's nonsense I mean of course we're all connected in a in a network of human relationships all the time which sustain us I mean people are out in fields picking crops so we can eat people are making clothing that we have to wear so the idea that you you can move through the world as a self-sustaining individual is it's a fiction it's it's a it's a delusion really and so I don't know how that can apply interpersonally by which I don't mean to suggest everyone has to find one person and get married at a certain age or ever um but the human relationships are very important they're very sustaining whatever form they take they don't need to be conventional they can be very unconventional but but they're not just optional you can't just opt out of the rest of humankind and I don't I don't believe that and I do find it a little bit strange that as you say that there's this vogue for saying well it's all about yourself now you have to be the one to love yourself and you have to be the one to change yourself because I don't necessarily believe that that's possible right are you are you I as a writer when you talked before that you were not totally optimistic about the relationship ending in a positive way whether being Darcy or or Nick and Francis or maybe even these two here because they are in your new book they are also trying to get away from each other in a way and they can't really yeah I mean it's it's it's like they're trying to not so get together and are you as a writer a bit pessimistic or are you as a person a bit dismissed thing about you know romantic happy-ever-after love stories no I would say I'm extremely optimistic and I think I'm almost naively optimistic about I think the ability of human beings to love one another and I am NOT you know I really like people I don't have that sense of feeling disgusted with human society or feeling like I mean I'm disgusted with a lot of aspects of human society but I'm never disgusted with people that I meet I really like people and so um when I write about people's intimate relationships I can't help that I feel there must be some chance for us to even though the obstacles may be very serious and may be very difficult to overcome I can't believe that they're impossible to overcome I have to believe that it's it is possible even not at not at every moment not in every situation but that it has to be you know for me to carry on living and to retain my sanity in this world I have to believe that's possible so I think that that belief definitely comes across with my words that also part of your writing yeah to keep that yeah definitely yeah I couldn't I couldn't do what I do if I didn't believe that yeah [Applause]

Transcript for:Sally's Exploration of Love in Literature

Transcript for:
Sally's Exploration of Love in Literature