The Millions

Then Who Am I? The Millions Interviews Kathleen Hill

Kathleen Hill is the author of two novels, Still Waters in Niger and Who Occupies This House. Her memoir, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels will appear in late October and is the subject of the interview that follows. She teaches in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence. In conversation with Margot Livesey, her writing friend of many years, Hill reflects on the relationship between life and reading, travel and reading, and the difficulties of writing about family and friends.

  Thank you for the profound pleasure of .  I love how this book combines the autobiographical and the literary, and how each informs, and interrogates, the other.  From the moment I read the opening pages, about the child standing on her head, studying the house supported by its chimney pots, I knew this narrative was going to speak to me, and to many others, at the deepest level.  You write about several wonderful novels. Was one of them in particular the inspiration for ?  Was it hard, after many decades of reading, to choose which novels to focus on?

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