The Colonizers
Claire Messud’s novel intimately considers the legacy and trauma of the pieds-noirs through the story of a family living in Marseilles, France in the 1980s and 1990s.
Claire Messud
The Small Tragedies of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children
9/11 is the catalyst to launch the characters of Claire Messud’s 2006 novel from their delayed adolescence into the sobriety and cynicism of adulthood among New York’s intellectual elite.
On Intimacy: Elena Ferrante & Stacey D’Erasmo
It seems as though people do not want to believe that fiction can be intimate—that is: detailed, personal, private, sacred, something with which readers feel closely acquainted or familiar. It is especially surprising if it is also broad, and that one book can accomplish both apparently astounds reviewers.
When Parents Die: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs
Last week my friend’s mother died, with brutal speed, of cancer. Ten years ago, my father died of a neurological disease so drawn out and cruel that we all wished for its end. Parents die, usually before their children, and so both of these deaths were inevitable in one way or another. But as the…
Literary Teachers and Their Lessons
I have a new teaching job this fall, and so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about classrooms, and teachers, and the hold they have on our imaginations. It’s strange to realize, right before I walk into a classroom to teach, how clearly I can remember most of my own teachers’ faces, even many…