Mindy Withrow

Well Said: “harrowing ordinariness”

Novelist and short story writer Carrie Brown on writing about the underdog and her appreciation [shared with me!] for the novels of Iris Murdoch:

I’m interested in what seems to me the harrowing ordinariness of an ordinary life, and maybe the underdog is the archetypal ordinary man….  I am a great admirer of Iris Murdoch, who took her philosophical training at Oxford and then went on to write some thirty or so novels, a remarkable achievement. I like her work because I like her characters’ preoccupation with the state of their souls and the nature of goodness—their own, other people’s, the world’s. I’m interested in goodness the way some writers are interested in evil, perhaps, although maybe they’re just two sides of the same coin. I’m interested in how we grapple with the ethical, moral questions in our lives. I see the challenges of our lives, the conflicts, in those terms, as questions of right and wrong, good and bad. I’m interested in the emotional and psychological dimension of the struggle to be good, to live an ethically responsible life. I’m interested in how shockingly difficult it is to be good. And I’m interested in our failures in that regard—exactly how we fail and why, how we console ourselves and others, how we forgive ourselves and others, how we fail to forgive.

Read the rest of her interview in Glimmer Train‘s Bulletin 34.

12. November 2009 by Mindy
Categories: Well Said | 1 comment