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Norah Vincent is the New York Times bestselling author of Self-Made Man, as well as three other books, including Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf . Formerly an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she also contributed regularly to Salon, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. She died in July 2022.
Norah Vincent's website
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What was it about Virginia Woolf that compelled you to start writing Adeline?
I thought about writing this book about three years ago. At that time, I bought Hermione Lee's biography and read it. I bought and reread VW's major novels and her diaries. I had bought and read all five volumes of Leonard Woolf's autobiography ten years before, so I already had that in my mind and on the bookshelf.
But after doing all of this I found that the specter of VW was just too much for me. I thought what any normal person would think: Are you nuts? You can't write about VW, much less as her. Forget it.
So I did forget it, sort of, and I shelved the idea. But then, after going through a pretty awful depression in 2013, I came back to VW, for obvious reasons, I think. I really identified with her struggle with mental illness and creative self-confidence. Also, I had just gotten married, so I realized that I wanted to write a book about marriage.
I've always felt that Leonard Woolf has been poorly represented/poorly remembered by history, and that VW has in a sense been too revered. He was a much kinder person I think than most people know, and she could be quite nasty personally, and often was. In writing about them I wanted to present a ...
Cris Beam is the author of Transparent and has written for public radio's This American Life, as well as for several national magazines. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia and teaches creative writing at Columbia, NYU, ... (more)
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