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EXPRESS YOURSELF
Readers Connect With Emotion: A Q&A with author Lily King
The author of “Writers and Lovers” talks about her new short story collection, “5 Tuesdays in Winter”
When Lily King’s novel Writers and Lovers was published in March 2020 — a coming of age tale about a woman starting her writing career in Cambridge, MA — the book quickly earned a following for its earnest depiction of the struggles and realities of a writing life, quickly becoming a NYT bestseller. Now, King is releasing her first short story collection, 5 Tuesdays in Winter, which she wrote over the last two decades. The stories, finely crafted, full of rich detail, and evocative, circle back to the theme of women writers.
I sat down with King at The Crooked Mile cafe in Portland, Maine. She talked about how older men were inspired by Writers and Lovers, her goals of writing political fiction, and how she started seeing herself as a legitimate writer.
HOPE REESE: What’s the concept behind the collection? Is there a unifying theme?
LILY KING: The book stands on three pillars: the stories Creature and Timeline and Man at the Door. They’re all first person narratives by women who become writers at different stages of their life. I wrote all of those before Writers and Lovers. I was trying things out. I was gearing up to write that novel. I was very careful to put those in a sequence — to have the youngest and middle and later stages spread out.
I was surprised, each time in these stories — especially in Creature and Timeline — when suddenly [the characters] were writers. In Creature, she’s 14, and this is just the moment she discovers she’s a writer. She says something like, “and that’s what I eventually became.” I wrote that sentence and thought: “Oh, I didn’t know we were going to jump into the future like that.” Never ever ever have I written about a character becoming a writer. But I am mid-career now; it is so much more part of my identity than it ever was before. It makes sense that I would feel comfortable writing about it.
When you start writing, do you have an idea of how the story will end?
