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127 Michael Cunningham Michael Cunningham is the author of five novels and one work of nonfiction . He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in La Cañada, California. Cunningham received his BA in English Literature from Stanford University and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. His novel The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa. Golden States, 1984; A Home at the End of the World; 1990; Flesh and Blood, 1995; The Hours, 1998; Specimen Days, 2005 Your first novel, Golden States, is a straight narrative, a coming-of-age story that covers just a few weeks in the life of a twelve-year-old boy. Would you talk about that book, about how the characters in it were, in a way, prototypes for characters that you in explored in later books, particularly in A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood? It’s true. The books often tend to contain a boy on a journey and a woman trapped in a tower. Golden States was a funny thing. It is my first novel. I wrote it very, very quickly. I was about to turn thirty, and I realized what I had for my years of writing thus far was seventeen abandoned beginnings. I began to realize that this was where old failures come from. First they’re young failures, then they’re middle-aged failures, then they’re old failures. I was working in a bar and I suddenly had this vivid image of myself at sixty, still in the bar, still talking about the novel I was going to write someday. So I said to myself, “Sit down now and finish something. It doesn’t matter what. Just start it at the beginning, write through the middle and reach the end and then stop.” And that was that book. It came out very quickly. And it’s true. It does contain some of the people I seem 128 the INtervIewS to have continued to write about. Boys looking for something, women looking for a way out. I never felt good about that book, because I wrote it too fast. Because I knew it wasn’t the best book I could write. I’ve always felt that literature and reading have so many enemies—and writers are the very least of the enemies of writing and reading. But I do sometimes find myself looking through the books in a bookstore and galleys people have sent me, thinking, you could have done better than this. You did not put your ass on the line. Here’s just another book taking up space in the universe, and this is part of what is making it hard to keep books alive in the world. They just stack up like cordwood. I’m so much more interested in some kind of grand ambitious failure than I am in someone’s modest little success that achieves its modest little aims. I felt that I had written a book like that, and I wasn’t happy about it. My publisher very generously allowed me to turn down a paperback offer and it has really gone away. You don’t list it with your novels. Not listing it, frankly—though I didn’t fight this—was a sort of marketing ploy, when my second book came out. It’s much, much easier to sell a first novel. [Golden States] had sold about seventeen copies and nobody knew about it. The irony, of course, is now they sell for several hundred dollars on the Internet. The next two books, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, are similar in theme and in the way the stories are told. They’re just plain “good reads” in the traditional sense. Would you talk about the relationship between the two? I’ve always felt like I want to sit at the table with Susan Sontag on my right and Pia Zadora on my left. I want my books to occupy some sort of tricky zone between the dead serious and the—I wouldn’t want to say pulpy or even frivolous—but you know what I mean. Books you might want to take on an airplane. I wrote A Home at the End of the World...

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