Peter Ho Davies: Writing About Loved Ones

Today, I’m talking to Peter Ho Davies about the difficult task of writing about your loved ones. He struggled with this both in his recent novel and in the memoiristic frame he created for his book The Art of Revision. And he’s still struggling with it with his new work-in-progress. What advice does he have for us to get through it?

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Peter Ho Davies’ most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word, his first work of non-fiction. Other books include the novels, The Fortunes, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award; The Welsh Girl, long-listed for the Booker Prize, and a London Times bestseller; as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan awards, his fiction has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Granta and been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he currently directs the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

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