Mark Cugini's Blog
June 21, 2013
Monstrous Women: An Interview with Alissa Nutting
I talked to Alissa Nutting about her sensational new book Tampa.
On writing to make her audience uncomfortable:
“I knew I had to battle against normalization and complacency on every page. As the novel progresses, we go deeper and deeper into her head and she begins to engage in more and more transgressions. So my challenge was to ensure that her behavior continued to feel shocking and dangerous, and continued to make readers feel very uncomfortable–I couldn’t let readers become desensitized to what she was doing or have it feel routine. My process with that was to ensure that I continually disturbed myself writing the book. Editing, if I could read through a few pages without getting a knot in my stomach, I knew I hadn’t pushed things far enough there and needed to revisit that area of the text.”
CONTINUED at HTMLGiant
On writing to make her audience uncomfortable:
“I knew I had to battle against normalization and complacency on every page. As the novel progresses, we go deeper and deeper into her head and she begins to engage in more and more transgressions. So my challenge was to ensure that her behavior continued to feel shocking and dangerous, and continued to make readers feel very uncomfortable–I couldn’t let readers become desensitized to what she was doing or have it feel routine. My process with that was to ensure that I continually disturbed myself writing the book. Editing, if I could read through a few pages without getting a knot in my stomach, I knew I hadn’t pushed things far enough there and needed to revisit that area of the text.”
CONTINUED at HTMLGiant
