One of the things I’ve always loved about queer culture is the openness and passionate curiosity about love, desire and the myriad forms of affectionate ties. – Stacey D’Erasmo
In my family, we were on again off again Unitarians, partly because my father, raised Roman Catholic, had had enough of church. – Stacey D’Erasmo
In my darker moments, I feel like the Queen of England, bound and gagged by reverence. Tin-crowned and irrelevant. – Stacey D’Erasmo
The ambition of ‘Ten Thousand Saints,’ Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arm’s length will never do. We want to get closer. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson’s forte. In her novels, ‘Anywhere but Here,’ ‘The Lost Father’ and ‘A Regular Guy,’ Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies. – Stacey D’Erasmo
What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter’s pellucid first novel, ‘The Apartment,’ it may be simply the length of a day – but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively. – Stacey D’Erasmo
One of the many pleasures of ‘Versailles’ is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was. – Stacey D’Erasmo
‘The Girls,’ by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Shelley Jackson’s ‘Half Life’ is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman. – Stacey D’Erasmo
The knot of intimacy at the center of ‘Ten Thousand Saints’ is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn. – Stacey D’Erasmo
One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them. – Stacey D’Erasmo
A lot of times, really wonderful things that have come my way have come basically out of the blue. – Stacey D’Erasmo
You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of ‘The L Word’ that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a claim on Large – as in a larger, denser, more ambivalent imaginary world, populated by imperfect and riveting citizens of all sexual stripes. – Stacey D’Erasmo
All writers are magpies, right? We’re always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest. – Stacey D’Erasmo
On a deeper level, there’s a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there’s been a time when there’s been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to sort of rebuild that private space. – Stacey D’Erasmo
A touring band is a family and a workplace at the same time, and you’re living with people you didn’t necessarily choose every day for up to a year. – Stacey D’Erasmo
The songs in ‘Wonderland’ don’t have a melodic life for me – I’m not a musical person – but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps. – Stacey D’Erasmo
That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form. – Stacey D’Erasmo
If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads. – Stacey D’Erasmo
I don’t know if my faith stems from what I’d call unconditional love, but the energy certainly feels boundless. – Stacey D’Erasmo
I don’t go online when I’m writing – that’s the devil’s workshop – but in general, I’m on there as much as any other global citizen. – Stacey D’Erasmo
Prior to the institutionalization of standard time, clocks were set using local meridians or local mean time, and they varied widely. – Stacey D’Erasmo
As lightly toned by reality as the women on ‘Sex and the City,’ the bold, soigne characters on ‘The L Word’ suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the entire world is glowing and delectable. – Stacey D’Erasmo
You can get anything online, including things that don’t even exist. We’ve invented our own collective unconscious. The normal rules of time and space don’t apply. It’s held together by some other force than gravity. It’s endless. It’s like some unimaginably huge, messy novel that’s writing itself both with and without us. – Stacey D’Erasmo
