To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.
Rachel KushnerAnd here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that itโs a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people donโt find you and your dream utterly revolting.
Rachel KushnerPeople who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.
Rachel KushnerI was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.
Rachel KushnerAs to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.
Rachel Kushner