The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable.

Garth Greenwell

Categorized in : Book Winning Gay

I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

Garth Greenwell

titles book sex

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

Garth Greenwell

writing littles thinking

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Garth Greenwell

quality class way

I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

Garth Greenwell

inward writing thinking

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Garth Greenwell

patterns reflection thinking

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: none of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

Garth Greenwell

ambition people thinking

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

Garth Greenwell

musician college years

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

Garth Greenwell

bulgaria beautiful country

My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

Garth Greenwell

months world firsts

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Garth Greenwell

form important literature

I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

Garth Greenwell

mars consciousness voice

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

Garth Greenwell

kind real book

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Garth Greenwell

responsibility book thinking

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

Garth Greenwell

use doe facts

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Garth Greenwell

nonfiction hints boundaries

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

Garth Greenwell

invisible blind people

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

Garth Greenwell

gay white writing

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

Garth Greenwell

gay character book

I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

Garth Greenwell

light sex thinking

I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

Garth Greenwell

gay doe writing