Culture Diary: Marilynne Robinson

The most soothing and delightful things I found out about the acclaimed author from her New Yorker profile

Photo by LiquidBonez via Creative Commons

I probably read Housekeeping for the first time in grad school. Marilynne Robinson is sort of a god in writer circles. And rightly so. The woman is a genius and her writing is revelatory—both quiet and explosive.

Anyway, I loved the book — it was unlike anything I’d ever read before. I’ve reread it since and remain blown away by the slow buildup of tension, of beauty in each image. I’ve since read Gilead, which I didn’t love as much but is a masterpiece in its own right, and a book of her essays, which I found a little too religious and esoteric for my taste. But that’s who she is.

Recently, the New Yorker published a profile of Robinson, and I was delighted by it. It was exactly the soothing piece I needed to read during the stress of election week. Here are the favorite facts and quotes I got from that profile:

• She doesn’t like to visit the homes of dead writers because she prefers to think of her favorite writers “off writing somewhere.”
• “She considered the day a success because she had perfected a single sentence.”
• She’s converted her dining room into “something of a rare-books library” and so needs to wedge plates of crackers and cheese in between books when entertaining
• She doesn’t drive — has never driven — because of a traumatic car accident she and her family were in when she was 12
• She went to college here in Providence, at Pembroke College, which was the sister college to Brown University
• “She is formidably erudite but punctuates her speech with the surprisingly sweet refrain “you know?”
• “ she does not speak of the divorce, or of the man to whom she was married. But she loves to talk about motherhood and her children, and she describes bringing them up as the most sustained act of attention she could imagine.”
• “I don’t ever remember her writing,” Robinson’s younger son, Joseph, says, “but I do remember playing with my brother a lot, so it must have been happening then, while we played, or maybe while we slept. It was this other…