The Broad Picture: Essays 1987-1996

by Lynne Tillman

The first collection of essays from one of America's most exceptional writers

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Here’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.

My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.

Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.

I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man.

As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.

When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don’t know, have or haven’t experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that’s been written.

Reviews

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lynne Tillman has an interesting mind, and it was inspiring to follow her thoughts, even when I did not always find the same things compelling, or to the same degree anyway. But some of these essays that discuss racism and the sort of social sadism that makes sadistic policies and politicians possible are relevant as they were when she wrote these essays in the 90s. If I were teaching writing, I would definitely assign this book because the woman knows how to think on paper, and that is a skill anyone who calls themselves a student or scholar should practice.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The body can’t be read like a book. Bodies lie too. I’ve been with lying bodies. Mine has lied.”