Helen DeWitt’s hectic, disruptive style reflects the content of her stories: the difficulty of living an authentic life, or telling anything like a “story,” in a ruthlessly disruptive world.
Helen DeWitt
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How Author Helen DeWitt Uses Language to Address the Problems In Her Life
In New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen has an interview with Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods. Owing to a combination of misfortunes, misunderstandings and publishing-related snags, the critically acclaimed novelist has been perennially broke. But, despite a history of brushes with suicide, she has a secret weapon against letting life’s problems get […]
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Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative […]