Amy Bloom (b. June 18, 1953) writes fiction, memoir, essays, and television scripts, and she trained and practiced as a psychotherapist for more than twenty years before she built her literary reputation. The sequence reverses the usual one. Most novelists come to psychology, if at all, through reading. Bloom came to fiction through the consulting room, and the consulting room shaped the prose that followed.
She was born Amy Beth Bloom in New York City into a home where storytelling and psychological inquiry sat side by side. Her father, Murray Teigh Bloom, wrote for a living. Her mother, Sydelle Cohen, practiced psychotherapy. In an interview with me in 2009, Bloom described a household that placed an unusual premium on literacy and almost no premium on the markers of middle-class striving. Her parents bought no braces and arranged no nose jobs, and nobody, she recalled, drummed achievement into the children. The unspoken message from her father, she said, ran something like this: anyone who could read and write well would be fine, and his worries ended once his children were literate. That early indifference to credentialing produced a writer who measures her work against an internal standard rather than against applause.
She attended Wesleyan University, graduated magna cum laude with degrees in theater and political science, and earned election to Phi Beta Kappa. As a child she wanted, in her own words, to be a reader and to be left in peace. She entertained a brief fantasy of becoming a warrior, a Joan of Arc without the auditory hallucinations and the fire, and then set ambition aside. Through most of college she waited tables and tended bar. She considered law, partly because her oldest sister practiced it well, and abandoned the idea after watching her sister defend a man Bloom judged guilty. She thought she might direct in the theater. None of these paths held.
After Wesleyan she earned a Master of Social Work from Smith College and opened a psychotherapy practice in Connecticut that she kept for more than two decades. The clinical years gave her the raw material of her imagination and a method of attention. She learned to watch the gap between what a person says and what a person feels, to let people finish their own sentences, and to treat behavior as evidence rather than as occasion for verdict. She has said that her training reinforced an inclination she already had toward observation.
Her transit from therapy to authorship has the quality of an accident she did not resist. On the drive home from a meeting with the analyst who might have supervised her training as a psychoanalyst, she found herself working out a plot for a murder mystery. She passed the college where she had tended bar, where her last task at each alumni party had been to wake the old graduates and confirm they were still alive, and she imagined how it might play if one of them were dead. By the time she reached home she had fifteen pages of notes. She telephoned the analyst and told him she would not begin training. His reply, as she recounts it, was practical: neither of them was getting any younger, and she should not dawdle. The mystery served as a warm-up. Halfway through it she began writing short stories.
Bloom entered American letters with the story collection Come to Me in 1993. The book reached the finals for the National Book Award and announced a writer who could render ordinary lives with exact emotional pressure. At a moment when literary minimalism set the terms for much short fiction, her stories carried warmth and psychological range while holding to a spare line. Her recurring subjects appeared at once: divorce, illness, grief, sexual identity, and families assembled outside the conventional pattern. She treats behavior as evidence rather than as occasion for verdict. She tends to withhold explanation and to let dialogue and observed gesture carry the emotional freight.
Her first novel, Love Invents Us, followed in 1997 and tracked Elizabeth Taube from a starved girlhood on suburban Long Island through the loves that form her. Her second story collection, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000), reached the finals for the National Book Critics Circle Award and fixed her standing among the country’s leading practitioners of the form. She has remained loyal to the short story across her career on the conviction that the large transformations of a life often occur in small moments rather than at obvious turning points.
Her nonfiction book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude (2002) examined transgender and intersex lives with the same clinical curiosity she brings to her characters, and it did so years before such subjects moved to the center of public argument. The book trades sensation for close attention.
Away (2007) widened her canvas. The novel follows Lillian Leyb, a Russian Jewish immigrant who survives anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe and crosses the continent in search of her lost daughter. Bloom joined archival research to an intimate narrative line and treated immigration as an experience of grief and endurance rather than as a parable of triumphant arrival. The book won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and drew praise for its prose and its handling of displacement. A third story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, appeared in 2010.
She kept moving between the family chronicle and the historical novel. Lucky Us (2014) follows two half sisters through the Depression and the Second World War. White Houses (2018) imagines the interior of the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalist Lorena Hickok, a choice that reflects her long attention to attachments that form outside the sanctioned categories.
In 2022 Bloom published her most personal book, the memoir In Love. It recounts her husband Brian Ameche’s diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and the couple’s decision to travel to the Swiss organization Dignitas, where he ended his life through accompanied dying. Ameche was her husband of twelve years, a former Yale football player who practiced architecture for four decades. The narrative opens with their trip to Zurich in January 2020. Bloom writes with restraint about autonomy, marriage, and the obligations a spouse carries through a terminal illness, and the memoir became a New York Times bestseller and opened a public conversation about assisted dying and caregiving.
She returned to the family saga with I’ll Be Right Here (Random House, 2025), a multigenerational novel that follows an unconventional Jewish family from prewar Paris into postwar America and gathers her standing themes: chosen kin, resilience, displacement, the persistence of love after loss. The following year she entered a new genre. Blunt Instrument (Mysterious Press, June 2, 2026) opens the Dell Chandler mystery series, with a failed English professor turned private investigator drawn into the death of a professor at a Connecticut college. Reviewers received it as an assured genre debut that kept her wit and her command of character intact.
Her career has run beyond books. In 2007 she created and wrote State of Mind, a Lifetime drama starring Lili Taylor as a psychotherapist managing her practice and her tangled private life. She published a children’s book, Little Sweet Potato, in 2012. Alongside the writing she built an academic career, teaching creative writing for years at Yale University before moving to Wesleyan, where she served as the Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence, then as the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, and as director of the university’s Shapiro Center. Her classroom doctrine favors observation over theory. She presses students to find character through attention to behavior and language rather than to impose a theme on a story.
Bloom occupies a settled place within the literary community. She edited The Best American Short Stories 2014, and her own stories have appeared in that series and in The O. Henry Prize Stories. She won a National Magazine Award for fiction, and her essays have run in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, Slate, Salon, and New York Magazine.
In 2009, she told me that God has never held currency for her, that her parents identified strongly as Jews while professing atheism, and that she entered a synagogue as a child only to accompany her grandparents so the family would keep the peace. She likened the condition of being Jewish to the condition of a fish asked to describe water. She also named, without melodrama, the casual anti-Semitism she has met outside heavily Jewish settings, the remark that she does not seem Jewish, the surprise that she seems so nice.
She revises a piece many times, sometimes past thirty drafts, reads it aloud, and stops when it reaches the best she can manage. The verdict is mostly internal. External praise pleases her without governing her. She holds that her obligation runs to the work, that she should not publish what she judges to be poor, and that in writing she has no one to blame but herself. She quotes Swift on the folly of wanting to meet the writer because one admires the book, the way a man might wish to know the chicken because he likes the eggs.
A few commitments run through the body of work. Bloom declines to sort people into heroes and villains and prefers characters whose virtues and faults hold at the same time. She returns to chosen families, on the view that love often grows through deliberate attachment rather than blood. She writes about sexuality, aging, illness, and death as ordinary features of a life rather than as exceptional conditions, and her years as a therapist give her dialogue a documentary authenticity. Her line is compressed and confident. She builds scenes and trusts the reader to draw the emotional inference from a gesture. Humor sits beside grief in her pages, and acts of care interrupt suffering. Across more than three decades she has resisted cynicism and kept her interest fixed on resilience, forgiveness, and the small decisions through which people go on caring for one another.
Her titles keep returning to one word. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Love Invents Us. Where the God of Love Hangs Out. In Love. Four books, one word, and the word reads like a password into a faith her readers assume they share with her. Most of them do not share it. They recognize the spelling and miss the doctrine.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that a man arranges his life against the knowledge that he will die, and that he buys significance by serving something he treats as deathless. The deathless thing changes by culture. The warrior serves the tribe, the monk serves God, the maker serves the work. Each calls his own version sacred and finds the rest strange or small. A sacred word crosses between these worlds and loses its meaning at every border. For Amy Bloom the border runs through the word love, and her love would be unrecognizable to most of the people who use it.
In 2009 she told me that her parents identified as Jews and professed atheism, that she entered a synagogue as a girl only to spare her grandparents. Her love cannot point upward. It has no heaven to climb toward and no judge to satisfy. It travels sideways, mortal to mortal, and then it ends, because the people end.
Twenty years in a Connecticut consulting room gave her the discipline the fiction runs on. She watches the space between what a person says and what he feels. She lets people finish their own sentences. She withholds the verdict. In her stories the hero and the villain collapse into the same flawed person, observed without flinching and without flattery. To love, in her cosmos, is to look at a man clearly and tell the truth about him. The heroic act is attention.
Two threats stalk this faith. The first is the body’s end, which she refuses to dress up or postpone with comforting talk. The second is the consoling lie, the flattering sentence, the moral cartoon that turns a person into a saint or a monster. Each is a death. The first kills the man. The second kills the truth of him, and for a writer with no afterlife the truth of him is the only part that lasts. She revises past thirty drafts and will not publish what she judges poor. She says she has no one to blame but herself. The well-made sentence is the closest thing to permanence she lets herself want. A physician near seventy once approached her in Amsterdam and said of a character, she is me, the way she lived is the way I have lived, thank you. That recognition is the only resurrection she claims.
Carry the word into other rooms and watch it turn into something else.
A Trappist rises for the night office at three. He wears the white cowl, takes oatmeal in silence, keeps the hours that have not changed in centuries. For him love empties the self toward God. The brother in the next stall is the occasion of love, not its object. To fix his whole heart on one mortal man, with no reference above, would steal from the love owed to Him. He hears Bloom’s devotion to a single dying husband as tender and unfinished, a candle lit in a room with no window.
A gray-bearded elder sits on a charpoy in Khost and pours green tea into a glass. At the meal he seats the guest above his own sons. For him love is loyalty to blood and the debt that loyalty carries, the welcome owed a stranger and the vengeance owed an insult. Love that failed to answer harm done to kin would be a counterfeit. He hears the phrase chosen family as a contradiction in the grammar. You do not choose your family. Your family is chosen for you, before your birth, by blood that has nothing to ask of your preferences.
A young man in Berkeley works at a standing desk with a tab open to a cost-effectiveness estimate and a glass of oat milk going warm beside the keyboard. For him love that spends months and savings escorting one husband through a private death, while children die of malaria for the price of a bed net, is love misallocated. Love must scale. Love kept impartial does the most good, and love kept partial is favoritism wearing better clothes. He admires her prose and mourns her arithmetic.
A surgeon works a field hospital under canvas, the cots ordered by who can still be saved. He loves the wounded by sorting them. The corpsman points to a man and asks, this one, and the surgeon lays a hand on the shoulder, says he’s gone, and moves to the next cot. Love that lingered over the dying would cost the living man his leg. To love here is to keep moving and to keep deciding.
The list runs on. The widow in forty years of black, for whom love is grief that never stops, since to stop grieving would be to stop loving. The patriot, for whom love is the readiness to die for a flag. The parent, for whom love is the hand that will not let go. The same five letters, a dozen incompatible religions, and the worshippers in each find the others sentimental, cold, fanatical, or naive.
Bloom’s love is what survives the subtraction. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) calls the secular self-account a subtraction story, the claim that we stripped away God and superstition and consoling fiction and reached the world underneath. Take away the heaven the monk climbs toward. Take away the blood-debt the elder honors. Take away the spreadsheet, the flag, the black dress. What remains is a flawed mortal you must look at with clear eyes and love regardless, knowing he will die and stay dead. That is all of it. The astonishing thing is that she finds it enough.
The faith meets its trial in In Love. Zurich, January 2020, a car service to the airport, business-class pods her sister has paid for, two travelers who are polite to the flight attendants and happy to be going somewhere together. They are going to Dignitas. Brian Ameche (d. 2020), her husband of twelve years, a big man who played football at Yale and designed buildings for forty years, has early-onset Alzheimer’s and has told her he would rather die standing than live on his knees. She researches the options at his direction. She manages the interviews and the paperwork. She sits in the room and lets him go.
Here her love must do what no other faith on the tour will ask of it. The monk’s love keeps the man alive for God to gather in His own time. The elder’s love never delivers the beloved to strangers in a foreign suburb. The surgeon triages bodies he means to save. The widow nurses to the final breath and grieves four decades after. Bloom books the flight, holds his hand, and helps him stop existing, because she has defined love as fidelity to what the person wants and the refusal to lie to him about what is coming. The book is the test and the cost of the definition. It asks whether a love with no heaven behind it can carry the weight of a death, and she stakes the answer on the prose holding steady, which it does.
So she can be located. The sacred sits inside the human, in the quality of attention one mortal pays another, with nothing above it and nothing after. The cost is consolation. She surrenders the afterlife, the verdict, and the comforting story, and keeps the clear look in exchange. And the limit. Her love saves no one. It could not save Brian. It could sit in the room with him and refuse to look away. For a writer who believes the body ends and nothing follows, sitting in the room and refusing to look away is the largest thing a hero can do, and she has spent a career insisting it is large enough.
The Voice
Bloom writes in the present tense and trusts it to do the work that other writers hand to drama. The present tense keeps her level with her characters. She is not reporting a settled past from a height. She stands inside the moment and watches it the way she once watched a patient, alert to the distance between what a person says and what the person feels. The composure is the first thing you notice and the hardest to account for, because the material underneath it is rarely calm.
Her diction sits on a plain Anglo-Saxon floor and rises from there by surprise. She builds a sentence out of small ordinary words, then lets one literary lift or one piece of Yiddish or one flat vulgarism drop into it, and the collision carries the charge. The opening of In Love treats the trip to an assisted death as a couple’s familiar pleasure, travel and shopping, a car service so they can feel fancy and skip the park-and-shlep. The Yiddish noun lands in the middle of the gravest errand of her life and does not lighten it so much as humanize it. She seasons high feeling with the kitchen vocabulary of a marriage. The effect is intimacy, the sense that you are hearing a private register most writers clean up before publication.
The wit runs on a single move, repeated across decades. She offers the romantic or the tender image and then amputates it with a clinical detail. She told me that as a child she thought she might be a warrior, a Joan of Arc, and then cut the line with the hallucinations and the burning. She gives you the silk and then names the thread count. In Blunt Instrument (2026) the detective rates her own body in tailored clothes and then in ruffles, where she compares herself to a beribboned side of beef. The sentence builds on a flat declarative rhythm and saves the deflating simile for the end. That is her comic architecture in miniature, the periodic sentence that withholds its sting until the last beat.
Notice what the wit is for. It guards against sentiment. Bloom feels deeply and distrusts the prose that announces deep feeling, so she lets comedy arrive a half second before the emotion can curdle. The joke is the breakwater. Behind it the grief sits at full height, undiminished, because she never used the joke to deny the grief, only to keep it from spilling into bathos. Most writers who are funny about death are running from it. Bloom is funny about death while looking straight at it, and the two operations holding at once is the rarest thing she does.
Her rhetoric is the rhetoric of withholding. She declines the verdict. She lets dialogue and observed gesture carry the meaning and trusts the reader to draw the inference she refuses to state. The hero and the villain dissolve into the same flawed person, watched without flattery and without contempt. This is the therapist’s neutrality turned into a literary method, the discipline of letting people finish their own sentences. She does not explain her characters. She arranges the evidence and steps back, which puts an unusual demand on the reader and pays the reader an unusual respect.
She favors the catalog. The list is her instrument for getting the texture of a life onto the page fast, the modes of travel, the clothes that flatter and the clothes that do not, the small consumer facts of business class. The list also lets her hide feeling inside inventory. She will name six ordinary things and let the seventh carry the weight the first six were softening you to receive. When she breaks a parallel series, she breaks it on purpose, and the broken beat is where the truth usually sits.
Her aphorisms close like a lid. No one loves business class more than people who always fly coach. The line about wanting to know the writer because you admire the work, which she borrows from Swift, the chicken and the egg. She reaches for the compressed general statement at the moment a lesser writer reaches for explanation, and the compression does more than the explanation could. The aphorism is her way of ending a passage without summarizing it.
Asked what she writes out of, she named a kind of love and a kind of loneliness and then a third thing she said she could not identify. She will push a description as far as language takes her and then report the point where language stops rather than fake the last yard. That refusal to oversell the inner life reads, on the page, as trust. You believe her about the feelings she names because she tells you when she has run out of names.
The manner, finally, is the manner of a clinician who became an artist and kept the bedside composure. She does not raise her voice. She does not flatter the reader or herself. She told Ford she will not publish what she judges poor and that in writing she has no one to blame, and that severity shows in the finished line, which has been revised past thirty drafts to the point where nothing decorative survives. What remains is compression, plain words set in varied rhythm, comedy carrying grief, and a steady refusal to look away from the person in front of her. The voice is the sound of someone who spent twenty years being trusted with what people could not say, and who learned to write it down without breaking the trust.
The Set
Picture the room. A converted barn or a brownstone parlor, good light, more books than wall. The wine is decent and nobody comments on it, because commenting on it would be the wrong kind of noticing. The people in the room have published, taught, edited, judged, or reviewed, and they can place one another within a sentence or two of conversation by the names they drop and the names they withhold. This is the world of the consecrated American literary writer at the turn of the millennium and after, and Amy Bloom sits near its center.
Name the set. The peers and near-peers are the writers of literary realism who came up through the story collection and the small magazine and the prize: Alice Munro (1931-2024) as the patron saint of the form, Lorrie Moore (b. 1957), Antonya Nelson (b. 1953), Andrea Barrett (b. 1954), Tobias Wolff (b. 1945), Richard Russo (b. 1949), Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), Jennifer Egan (b. 1962), Ann Patchett (b. 1963). The forebears they invoke are Chekhov first and always, then Grace Paley (1922-2007), John Cheever (1912-1982), Mavis Gallant (1922-2014), Eudora Welty (1909-2001). The institutions that hold the set together are The New Yorker fiction pages, the editorship of an editor like the late Bill Buford or his successors, the Iowa and Bread Loaf and Sewanee circuits, the Best American and O. Henry anthologies, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle, the endowed chair at Yale or Wesleyan or Bennington. Bloom holds the Shapiro-Silverberg chair, directed the Shapiro Center, edited The Best American Short Stories 2014, and reached the finals for both the major prizes. She has the full set of credentials the set recognizes.
What they value comes down to attention, control, and the refusal of cheap effect. The highest praise in this world is that a writer sees clearly and tells the truth about ordinary people without flattering them or condemning them. The sentence must be earned. The feeling must be controlled. Sentiment is the cardinal sin, and so is its opposite, the cold cleverness that performs intelligence at the expense of warmth. The set wants both heat and discipline, the deep feeling held inside the well-made line. Bloom’s own credo fits the room exactly. She revises past thirty drafts, refuses to publish what she judges poor, and measures the work against an internal standard rather than the market.
The hero of this world is the writer who serves the work and not the reward. The economic rewards come and go, as Bloom told me, and saying so out loud is part of the performance, because the hero is supposed to be indifferent to money and devoted to the sentence. The deathless thing they serve is the work that lasts, the story a stranger will recognize himself in years later, the physician in Amsterdam who told her she is me. With no shared religion in the room, the work carries the weight a faith would carry elsewhere. To make a true sentence is the nearest thing to permanence.
The status games are subtle and constant. Open prestige-seeking is forbidden, so prestige is sought sideways. You signal by what you have read, by the obscurity and rightness of your enthusiasms, by the writers you decline to praise. You accrue capital through the right magazine, the right prize shortlist, the blurb you give and the blurb you receive, the anthology that selects you and later the anthology you get to edit. The editorship is the move that announces arrival, because the one who was selected now selects. Teaching at the right program ranks you. Being asked to judge ranks you. The set polices a boundary between art and the marketplace, and the policing is itself a status game, since the writer who needs the money least can disdain it most convincingly. Bloom plays this from a secure position and breaks one of its rules on purpose. She is candid about money where the room prefers discretion, the detective’s daily fee turned into a joke, the author photo calibrated so readers recognize her in the bookstore. The candor is a small flex. Only the secure can be that frank.
Their normative claims, the shoulds, run like this. A writer should observe before judging. A writer should grant every character interiority, including the unlikable one, because withholding it is a failure of craft and of decency at once. A writer should resist the moral cartoon, the saint and the monster, and should let dialogue and gesture carry meaning rather than explain. A writer should extend recognition to lives the wider culture has refused to see, which is why Bloom’s Normal on trans and intersex lives, and White Houses (2018) on a hidden same-sex attachment, read inside the set as exemplary rather than daring. A writer should be honest about sex, illness, aging, and death and should treat them as ordinary rather than scandalous. And a writer should never, under any circumstance, be sentimental.
Their essentialist claims, the deep beliefs about what people are, sit underneath the norms. People are mixed, never pure, virtue and fault holding in the same person at once. Character is revealed in behavior and in the gap between what a person says and what he feels, which is why the trained ear ranks so high. Love is the central human fact and it is mortal, horizontal, and unsponsored by heaven, at least in the secular wing where Bloom lives. The family you choose can outweigh the family you were born to. And ordinary life, not the grand event, is where the real transformations happen, which is the creed that justifies the short story as a form equal to the novel.
The moral grammar of the room is the grammar of empathy disciplined by craft. Judgment is suspect. Curiosity is sacred. The worst thing you can say of a writer is that she is cruel to her characters or, just as bad, that she loves them too easily. The right relation to a character is the therapist’s relation to a patient, close attention without verdict, and the set treats that stance as both an aesthetic and an ethic, the two fused so the good sentence and the good act become the same gesture. Cynicism is permitted in the work only if compassion survives it. Bloom is the set’s clean case here, funny about death while looking straight at it, the comedy guarding the grief rather than denying it.
Two tensions run through the world. The first is the tension between the autonomous claim, that they write for the work alone, and the apparatus of prizes, chairs, and anthologies that they plainly want and compete for. The set resolves this by making the wanting unspeakable, and Bloom strains the resolution by speaking it. The second is the tension between the duty to extend recognition to the marginal and the high-cultural register that keeps the work legible mostly to people already inside the room. They write generously about lives at the edge in a prose style that the edge is unlikely to read. Bloom’s late turn to the detective novel with Blunt Instrument (2026) reads, against this, as a quiet reach across the boundary, the consecrated writer spending some prestige to be read more widely, a move the set tolerates from her because she banked enough standing to make it without losing caste.
That is the social world. A room of secular humanists who replaced God with the well-made sentence, who treat clear-eyed attention as the highest virtue and sentimentality as the gravest sin, who compete fiercely while forbidding the appearance of competition, and who hold, as their bedrock belief, that the truest thing you can do for another person is to look at him without looking away. Bloom did that for twenty years in a consulting room before she did it on the page, which is why the room regards her as one of its own and one of its best.
Amy Bloom and the Knowledge That Will Not Be Stated
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) spent a career arguing against a comfortable idea, the idea that beneath our skills lies a body of tacit knowledge, a hidden rulebook we follow without knowing it. In The Social Theory of Practices (1994) he pressed the question that the phrase tends to dodge. Where does this knowledge sit, and how does it pass from one person to another? If a master has internalized rules he cannot state, and a student acquires the same competence, what exactly moved between them? Turner’s answer is that nothing was transmitted, because there was no shared hidden object to transmit. Each person grows his own habits, by his own history, and the habits happen to produce similar performances. The talk of transmitted tacit knowledge is a hopeful fiction we tell to explain a likeness we cannot otherwise account for. Run this skeptical instrument over Amy Bloom, a writer whose whole method lives below the level of statable rule, and watch what it exposes.
Bloom describes her craft in terms that all point downward, away from articulation. She told me that her psychotherapy training reinforced an inclination she already had, that by nature she likes to observe, that she pays attention to the gap between what a person says and how he feels. Read that sentence as Turner would. The training did not install a procedure. It met a disposition already present and strengthened it. Two decades in a Connecticut consulting room did not give Bloom a transferable technique so much as deepen a habit she brought with her, the habit of watching. Turner would press the point. The training cannot have transmitted the watching, because the watching was there first. What the training did was give a private disposition more occasions to run, more hours of practice, until it hardened into the thing reviewers later call her ear.
The ear is the crux. Critics reach for it constantly, the authenticity of her dialogue, the accuracy of her emotional registration, and they explain it by pointing to the twenty clinical years, as though the practice deposited a knowledge that then surfaced in the prose. Turner would call this the explanation that explains nothing. There is no portable object called the ear that passed from the therapy into the fiction. There is a woman who got very good at one performance, attending to the distance between speech and feeling, through long repetition, and who turned out to be good at a second performance that draws on the same disposition. The continuity is real. The transmitted substance is a fiction we use to name the continuity. Bloom did not carry knowledge from the office to the desk. She carried herself, the same nervous system trained on the same task, and the likeness between the clinician and the novelist is the likeness of one person doing what she has always done.
Now the hardest case, the revisions. Bloom revises a piece past thirty drafts. She reads it aloud. At some point she stops and says this is the best she can do as she intended it. Ask her for the rule that tells her when to stop and there is no rule. There is a judgment she cannot reduce to a procedure, a recognition that the sentence has arrived, arrived at a standard she carries but cannot write down. This is the exact place where the tacit-knowledge story wants to plant its flag. Surely, the story goes, she follows an internalized standard, a hidden rulebook of the well-made sentence, even if she cannot recite it. Turner’s challenge bites here. If the standard cannot be stated, in what sense is it a rule she follows? A rule you cannot formulate, cannot teach as a rule, and cannot check your work against except by the very judgment in question, is not a rule operating in secret. It is a trained capacity to feel that a thing is right, grown in one person over one history of practice, and the word standard dignifies it with a structure it does not have. Bloom stops at draft thirty-something because the disposition she built over decades fires a signal of completion. She is not consulting a code. She is the code, and the code cannot be extracted from her.
Carry the instrument into her classroom. Bloom teaches creative writing, at Yale for years and then at Wesleyan, and her doctrine is anti-doctrine. She favors observation over theory. She presses students to find character through behavior and language. She refuses to let them impose a theme on a story. Notice what she does not do. She does not hand them a method, a set of statable rules that would produce her kind of fiction. She cannot, because she does not possess her craft in that form. What she offers instead is exposure and correction, this works, this does not, watch how this writer does it, look harder at what your character actually does. Turner would read the whole pedagogy as proof of his thesis. If tacit knowledge were a hidden rulebook, the master could in principle dictate it, however laboriously. Bloom cannot dictate it. She can only arrange conditions under which a student might, through his own practice and his own history, grow a disposition that produces similar performances. She is not downloading her competence into them. She is hoping they build their own.
This is why her teaching looks like the apprenticeship to a trade. The student does not learn Bloom’s ear. The student, watched and corrected over time, develops an ear, which may resemble hers in output and shares nothing with hers in substance, because there is no shared substance to share. The program that trains writers operates on a fiction the program cannot afford to examine, the fiction that the master holds a transmissible knowledge of the craft. What the program supplies is the one thing Turner grants does the work, repeated practice under the eye of someone whose own dispositions have been shaped long enough to recognize the difference between the live sentence and the dead one. The recognition cannot be packaged. It can only be grown, slowly, in each writer separately.
Bloom names the inclination that preceded the training. She reports the judgment that ends the revision without claiming a rule behind it. She teaches by exposure because she has nothing else to teach. The continuity from therapist to novelist, the famous ear, the thirty drafts, the wordless click of completion, all of it tempts us toward the language of hidden mastery passed from practice to practice and from teacher to student. Turner’s skepticism strips the temptation away and leaves the plainer fact. There is a woman who watched people closely for a very long time, who built a disposition no sentence can hold, and whose finest performances issue from a knowledge that exists nowhere except in the act of her doing it. When she dies the disposition dies. The books remain, but the thing that made them does not transfer, and the students who resemble her will resemble her the way one craftsman resembles another, by having done the same work long enough to grow the same wordless feel for when it is finished.
Charles Taylor draws the line in A Secular Age (2007). The porous self lives open to a world charged with forces outside it, spirits, grace, meanings that come from beyond the skin and can enter, possess, heal, or curse. The boundary between inside and outside is thin, and the self is vulnerable because it is not sealed. The buffered self, the modern achievement, draws the boundary firm. Meaning originates inside the mind. The world out there is neutral matter. Nothing crosses the wall without the self’s consent, and the self is safe because it is closed. Taylor’s claim is that the West moved from one to the other, and that the buffered condition, for all its mastery, carries a cost, a felt flatness, a suspicion that the disenchantment went too far. Hold Amy Bloom against this distinction and she comes out as the buffered self, with one pressure point where the wall is tested.
Start with the unbelief. God holds no currency for her and never has. There is no porous opening upward in her world. Nothing descends into it. Grace does not enter, because there is no grace and no aperture for it to enter through. Meaning is made, by mortals, inside their own heads, and then offered across to other mortals. This is the buffered self stated at the level of doctrine. The wall is up, and she does not pretend otherwise or mourn the loss in religious terms.
Her method confirms the structure. The therapist watches the gap between what a person says and what he feels. She attends to interiors, hers and her characters’, as the place where meaning lives. The world supplies behavior, gesture, the observable surface, and the self does the work of reading it and assigning sense. Nothing speaks to her from outside the human. No omen, no sign, no voice. The whole apparatus of her fiction assumes that significance is generated within persons and transmitted between them through attention, which is the buffered account of where meaning comes from. She is a maker of meaning in a world that holds none on its own.
Watch how this organizes her relation to death, the place where the porous self historically found its widest opening. For the porous self death is a passage, the soul crossing to somewhere, the dead remaining present and reachable. Bloom closes that door. In In Love (2022) her husband Brian Ameche ends his life at the Swiss organization Dignitas, and she helps him do it. The book contains no afterlife, no consolation that he persists, no sense that he has gone somewhere rather than stopped. He dies and stays dead, and her love, which was horizontal and mortal all along, has nowhere to follow him. The buffered self meets death as termination, not transit, and Bloom meets it that way without flinching and without reaching for the porous comforts she does not believe in. The restraint of the memoir is the restraint of a sealed self refusing to leak.
The buffered self can find the closed world flat, drained, too small. Bloom’s defense against the flatness is not enchantment. It is attention raised to the pitch of devotion. She cannot let grace in, so she compensates by looking at the mortal surface harder than almost anyone, until the ordinary yields more than it seemed to hold. The physician in Amsterdam who told her she is me, the recognition a stranger feels reading her, is as close to communion as her cosmos allows, and it travels mortal to mortal, self to self, never down from above. She has taken the buffered condition and made a discipline of it, turning the closed self’s only resource, attention, into something that does the work enchantment once did. The well-made sentence revised past thirty drafts is her bulwark against the flatness, the made thing that holds meaning because she put it there.
Bloom reports a feeling that strains the model, though she keeps it inside the buffered frame. She says a character can come alive in her mind, that on a good day the voice unfurls like a bolt of silk, that she writes out of a love and a loneliness and a third thing she cannot name. The language of a character coming alive, of a voice arriving rather than being built, edges toward the porous, toward meaning that comes to her rather than from her. A porous writer would call this inspiration, a visitation, the muse entering the open self. Bloom does not. She holds it inside the buffered account. The character lives in her mind, her phrase, located firmly inside the wall, a product of her own faculties even when it feels like arrival. The honesty about the third thing she cannot identify is the honesty of a buffered self acknowledging that the inside is deeper than introspection reaches, not that anything got in from outside. The wall holds. She just admits she cannot see all the way to its base.
So Bloom is the buffered self with the cost paid down and converted. She built the wall, accepts the flat closed world it produces, and refuses the porous consolations of God, afterlife, and visitation that she does not believe. What she does with the buffered condition is the interesting part. She does not lament the disenchantment and she does not try to reverse it. She takes the one power the sealed self retains, the power to make meaning by attending, and she practices it hard enough to fill the space a faith would fill. The closed self looking at a dying husband and refusing to look away, making one true sentence about him because nothing else will outlast him, is the buffered self at full stretch, doing with attention what the porous self once did with prayer.
Mainstream social scientists and self-help architects frequently peddle the myth that human unhappiness is merely a misunderstanding—a cognitive glitch that can be ironed out if humans simply practice positive psychology, meditate, or adjust their expectations.
Bloom’s clinical background informs a fictional world that rejects this comforting premise. Her short stories and novels, such as Love Invents Us (1997) or her recent sprawling family epic I’ll Be Right Here, refuse to treat emotional pain as a temporary error in calculation. Her characters do not stumble into ruinous affairs, messy found-family arrangements, or intense attachments because they lack access to a rationality handbook. They act out of deep, unapologetic Darwinian imperatives: the pursuit of resources, intimacy, control, and social status. Love, in Bloom’s view, is often lawless, chaotic, and driven by raw desires rather than polite, logical “mission statements”.
By portraying these unvarnished motivations, Bloom’s narratives validate Pinsof’s assertion that the human mind is not broken and in need of an “intervention”; it is a finely tuned device optimized to chase its actual goals under whatever pretext works.
Pinsof notes that humans form coalitions and alliances not out of universal altruism, but to protect themselves, climb hierarchies, and find leverage in a competitive social marketplace. Bloom’s historical fiction, like White Houses, which chronicles the intimate, high-stakes relationship between Lorena Hickok and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, lays bare this competitive undercurrent.
Polite history often presents Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle through a lens of high-minded public service and moral altruism. Bloom’s exploration strips away the pure idealism to highlight the acute status politics, defensive self-preservation, and zero-sum operations within elite Washington circles. The characters are highly savvy actors manipulating their public images and private alliances to maintain control near the coercive apparatus of the state.
The transition in Bloom’s latest work highlights the competitive friction built into intellectual life. Her academic murder mystery, Blunt Instrument, shifts from the dreamy empathy often championed by literary elites to a droll, sharp-tongued look at the brutal world of higher education.
While universities loudly proclaim their devotion to higher learning, truth, and the cooperative expansion of human knowledge, Bloom treats the campus as a gladiatorial arena. The faculty members do not clash over simple misunderstandings or intellectual disagreements. They are locked in savage, zero-sum competition for prestige, resources, tenure, and dominance. Stupidity and moral posturing on campus are exposed as purely strategic levers used to down rivals and justify personal advancement. Bloom’s shift to a detective framework matches Pinsof’s perspective perfectly: beneath the feel-good bullshit of elite institutions lies a rational, highly competitive primate hierarchy where actors understand their true incentives all too well.
In her memoir In Love, Bloom chronicles her husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and her journey to help him end his life on his own terms at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. The book frames marriage, caregiving, and the end of life as a profound, intimate partnership driven by unconditioned love and individual choice.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, Bloom misinterprets the functional engine of the domestic unit. Human beings did not develop intense familial bonds to facilitate emotional fulfillment or customized exits from life. Throughout evolutionary history, the family unit has functioned as a primary optimization tool for group survival, designed to manage resource scarcity and protect vulnerable members within a hostile environment.
Love is the psychological armor used to bind the unit together so it can withstand external pressure. When a long-term illness or a structural crisis hits the home, the family behaves not as an open-ended therapeutic seminar, but as a defensive coalition marshaling its remaining material assets to secure its perimeter. Bloom treats the marriage as a sovereign emotional canvas, but realism reveals it as a biological survival arrangement.
Bloom’s early nonfiction book, Normal, profiles individuals who step outside conventional gender boundaries to fashion lives aligned with their true inner selves. She treats these unconventional identities with compassion, positioning the self as a plastic, expressive entity that can challenge rigid cultural myths through personal authenticity.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences places independent self-curation and complex lifestyle texts last among human motivations, falling far behind the unreflective drive for group conformity and survival. The fluid, customized identities Bloom profiles are luxury items available only during rare historical windows of absolute state security and material abundance.
The human mind is programmed during early childhood socialization to accept strict group boundaries and codes long before an individual can develop a stylized identity. When a dominant state secures the perimeter and maintains order, individuals can afford the illusion that their primary identity is a matter of independent choice. The moment that baseline protection fractures, the social animal drops its tailored lifestyle variations and returns instantly to primary, mass tribal alignments to secure physical protection.
In her historical novel Away, Bloom follows a young Russian Jewish immigrant who survives a horrific pogrom and treks across America to find her lost daughter. The narrative celebrates the endurance of the human spirit, showing how a marginalized individual uses grit, passion, and personal relationships to survive exile and rebuild a meaningful life from scratch.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology grounds this narrative of resilience in the brutal logic of relative power and coalition building. An isolated individual does not survive displacement through sheer interior depth or emotional connections.
In an anarchic arena, a displaced person survives by finding or bargaining his way into a protective collective vehicle. The language of hope and personal attachment used during these migrations is a tactical instrument used to manage reputations and secure allies. Bloom mistakes the psychological coping mechanisms of the immigrant for the material cause of her survival, while realism shows that without the armor of a cohesive group or a stable state structure, the lone individual is at the mercy of predatory forces.
My April 29, 2009 Interview With Author Amy Bloom
From AmyBloom.com: "Author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her latest novel, Away, is an epic story about a Russian immigrant. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University."
I talk to Amy Tuesday afternoon after rushing out of my two-hour appointment with physical therapist Lyn Paul Taylor. I’ve got a sore butt, aching feet, shin splints, and the worst TMJ he’s ever seen.
I sit in my car on Normandy and do the interview via my cell phone. I fear getting a parking ticket and I fear getting robbed and it would be just too embarrassing to have happen to me while talking to Amy Bloom.
What would she think?
Luke: "Amy, when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Amy: "A reader. I just wanted to read and be left in peace."
Luke: "Did you have any vocational ambitions as a child?"
Amy: "None at all. I think for a little while I thought it might be nice to be a warrior, a Joan of Arc without the auditory hallucinations and the burning, but I don’t remember having any other ambitions."
Luke: "And what about as you moved through your teens and into college?"
Amy: "I hoped to be employed. I worked pretty hard. I was a waitress through most of college. I had thought about being a lawyer. My oldest sister is a lawyer. She was very good at it. I went to watch her one day and I realized that the person she was defending was guilty and I was horrified. I thought I would be a director in theater. It was one of my majors in college (along with Political Science)."
Luke: "What did your parents most want from you?"
Amy: "Want from me or for me?"
Luke: "Both."
Amy: "What they wanted from me, I don’t know. What they wanted for me, for me to be safe and happy and successful in some line of work."
Luke: "What was your place in the social pecking order in high school?"
Amy: "I was a complete little weirdo and outsider with pink Harlequin glasses until ninth grade when suddenly all of my weirdness and grumpiness and sarcasm became extremely fashionable and then I was very cool, much to my astonishment, having not spoken to anybody for 14 years."
Luke: "When you enter a room full of strangers today, where do you go? Are you the life of the party?"
Amy: "I usually go into the kitchen and see if I can help to lay out hor’doeuvres."
Luke: "Were there any signs in childhood that you were going to become a professional writer?"
Amy: "That seems unlikely to me, though I spent a tremendous amount of time in the library. I did write poetry as a child, but it was of the rhyming kind. There was such a high value on literacy in my family that it wasn’t considered unusual or even worthy of comment. Of course you read widely. Of course one was engaged with the things one read. It wasn’t worth remarking upon."
Luke: "What were the most sterling things people said about you as a child and as a teenager when they were predicting your future place in the world?"
Amy: "Startling things?"
Luke: "Sterling things."
Amy: "I have no idea what people said about me when I was a kid. I don’t mean to be recalcitrant, I don’t remember anybody making any remarks to me as a child about my place in the world. I don’t remember anybody being at all interested in my place in the world. I think the unspoken message, certainly from my father, was that anybody who could read and write well would be fine. That his worries were over once we were literate. As a teenager? People said the kinds of things they say to young women who are argumentative and reasonably nimble intellectually. ‘Oh, you’d be a good lawyer. You like to argue and you’re bossy.’ My father, I think, had hoped that I might go to medical school."
Luke: "Who was the first serious person to tell you that you were going to be a professional writer?"
Amy: "Nobody ever told me I was going to be a professional writer… I knew that it was going to be possible for me to be a professional writer after I signed my first professional contract with Harper Collins to publish my first collection of short stories."
Luke: "How did you become a writer? You were a psycho-therapist."
Amy: "I had been thinking about becoming a psycho-analyst and had gone from meeting with the guy who would’ve been my training analyst and on the way home, I found myself thinking about a plot for a murder mystery. I drove past my college where I used to bartend. It was always my job as a bartender to wake up the old alumni at the end of the party just to make sure they weren’t dead. I remember thinking, it would be funny if they were dead. It’d be a good mystery. And so I made some notes and I started writing up the story and by the time I got home, I had about 15 pages of notes, and I called the guy who would’ve been my training analyst and I said, I don’t think I’m going to do this right now. I think maybe there’s a story I’d like to tell. He said to me very sensibly, ‘Neither of us is getting any younger. Don’t dawdle.’
"I started working on the mystery. It was like warm-up exercises for me. And then about halfway through the mystery, I started writing short stories."
Luke: "How do you realize you’ve done well with a piece of writing? Is it overwhelmingly something that comes from within you or are there external sources of validation?"
Amy: "The first feeling when you have finished a piece is, ‘Thank God I’m finished.’ And then, ‘Am I really finished?’ And then for me, ‘I’m probably not finished.’ This will be after a number of revisions. Do I need one more revision? This will be number 37. Then I might read it aloud yet again and go, ‘That’s OK. That’s the best I can do as I intended it.’
"It’s mostly internal. It’s always nice when people like what you have done, but that is not always the best gauge."
Luke: "Have you always had the sense that you are a pretty good gauge of yourself and know what you are doing?"
Amy: "Well, my marital history suggests otherwise, but I think that on the whole, I have mostly felt like I’m a reasonably reliable gauge for myself, which doesn’t mean I don’t make huge mistakes, but even then, I tend to be conscious of them."
Luke: "Did you have a sense as a child and a teenager that you had something wonderful to give to the world?"
Amy: "No, I didn’t. Mostly when I was a child, I hoped that the world would leave me alone because it was pretty clear to me that I was kind of an oddball. I had a pretty good time as a teenager. I don’t remember feeling like I had anything particular to contribute. I observed that I was a good teacher. I did a lot of tutoring of younger kids. I observed that I was good with kids and that I liked them and they liked me. I don’t remember concluding anything else about my talents."
Luke: "Are you a better therapist or a better writer?"
Amy: "I’ve had my days as both. I don’t practice any more as a therapist, but probably a better therapist. First of all, I’ve been doing it longer. Also, you have a partner as a therapist. That increases your chance of doing well. On the other hand, there have been times as a writer when I feel like I hit it out of the park. Whether you are a psycho-therapist or a writer, you only get a certain number of those."
Luke: "Out of which emotions do you do your best writing?"
Amy: "Is that like love or fear or is that just all of the emotions?"
Luke: "I do my best writing out of anger, so…"
Amy: "I see. I don’t do my best writing out of anger, though sometimes in essays the pleasure of the polemic is apparent, but not usually my fiction. I think I tend to write out of a very strong wish to tell a story and to see people come alive in my mind. That is probably a certain kind of love and a certain kind of loneliness and some other thing that I’m not really sure how to identify."
"I don’t find that much it [the writing] comes easy, unfortunately, though sometimes you have a really good day and the character is apparent and the voice unfurls like a bolt of silk."
Luke: "How has being Jewish affected your sense of where you are in the world?"
Amy: "It’s a difficult question for me to answer because I don’t know what it would be like to not be Jewish. I never went through a period of my life where I thought I wasn’t Jewish or other people thought I wasn’t Jewish. I think this is one of those ‘How do fish describe water?’ questions. I’m sure that the immigrant experience and the experience of hearing Yiddish spoken a great deal during my childhood, and the experience of hearing multiple languages spoken, and my parents’ very particular relationship with Judaism, which is on the one hand they certainly identified strongly as Jews, on the other hand they were both atheists and I was never in synagogue unless I was sent to accompany my grandparents so my grandparents wouldn’t be upset with the family, but all of those things have created all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies in my way of being and seeing, all of which I am very grateful for in much the same way I feel that being a woman has had much affect on my ways of being and seeing and being a mother has also had those affects."
Luke: "Have you ever experienced anti-Semitism?"
Amy: "Sure. Unless you stay only in the heart of a very Jewish community and never venture outside, you will…experience what I usually think of as casual anti-Semitism in which people say, you don’t seem Jewish, or you don’t sound Jewish or I’ve never known anyone Jewish like you, you seem so nice, or, oh, that’s why he was asking about the price? Because he’s Jewish.
"It’s not like being dragged off to the ovens, but it’s unmistakably a particular response to a group you are a member of, even if they don’t actively wish you harm."
Luke: "Has God ever been important to you?"
Amy: "No. I was not raised in a family in which that idea has had any currency and it has not changed for me over the years."
Luke: "How did you develop your quality control?"
Amy: "In what way?"
Luke: "I’m struck by how all of your writing is first-class. I read in one of your interviews that you bought back a mystery novel. Did your parents drum it into you that everything you do professionally must be first rate?"
Amy: "No. My parents for being middle-class Jewish parents were remarkably indifferent were remarkably indifferent to a lot of the things you would’ve thought they’d pay attention to. We didn’t have braces, nose jobs. Nobody ever drummed it into us about achievement. I don’t know what they were doing, but they weren’t doing those things.
"I think I’m a good editor. I edit my work. I don’t think the point is to be published but to write the best thing I can write. If it gets published, great. One of the things that I can control is the work I put out. I feel strongly it is my obligation to the work to not publish stuff I think is crap."
Luke: "Is there any other area of your life where you take the same care?"
Amy: "I take the same care with other things but it isn’t the same because in writing, I have no one to blame but myself. It’s not that way in relationships, for example. I am conscious of being the best mother I knew how to be but there are a lot of people involved. In writing, you have to take responsibility for every sentence, whether or not your editor said it was good enough. If you knew it wasn’t good enough and you let them publish it, shame on you."
Luke: "What do you love and hate about being interviewed?"
Amy: "Most of the bad things about being interviewed are located entirely within myself. Nobody ever puts a gun to your head and says, ‘You must be interviewed.’ I am subject to attacks of diffidence. One time I had an interview with somebody and the person, her style was to make these leading statements, which I understood later were designed to elicit responses from me, but I’m actually a pretty good listener, so she would make her leading statement and I would say, ‘I suppose you could look at it that way’, or ‘That’s an interesting point.’ I could hear her become more exasperated. Finally, two minutes before the end of the interview, I understood that all of those things were not designed for me to be politely interested but for me to say, ‘Oh, on the contrary…’
"Sometimes I feel comfortable entering into semi-personal chats with people I don’t know and other times I get this wet bathing suit feeling and find it more difficult. It’s not anybody else’s fault."
Luke: "But flattering is not one of the things you feel?"
Amy: "Good point. I should feel flattered. I guess it doesn’t occur to me. Sometimes I feel disbelieving."
Luke: "Most people love to talk about themselves, but not necessarily you."
Amy: "It’s not the thing I find easiest."
"I don’t mind having a chat. I’m a good conversationalist. Mostly I feel like it would be boring for people to have to hear, which is why I won’t write a memoir."
Luke: "Hostility is not one of your immediate reactions to a bad interviewer?"
Amy: "Oh no, because I’ve interviewed people. As a therapist, I spent a fair amount of time having conversations with people who found it difficult or found it easy…"
Luke: "Do you read biographies of great writers and if so, does it speak to you in a particular way?"
Amy: "I love the [David] Nokes biography of Jane Austen. And that one of Oscar Wilde by [Richard] Ellman. So, very randomly and very occasionally. Yeah, they speak to me in that I have gone out of my way to look for the biography because the writer speaks to me. Or, Noel Coward’s correspondence, which I liked very much. Oh, when I read Jane Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra and think about the kind of reviews she had to endure. There’s something very moving to me about it, that a writer like that would be dismissed as a country lady writing a mild amusement. It’s still distressing. Or, you read about Oscar WIlde’s terrible errors of judgment again and again and again. It breaks my heart that somebody should be so willfully self-destructive and self-deceiving on the one hand and so wonderfully clever on the other."
Luke: "I am often struck when I read these books that most of these writers write out of their failures in real life to communicate, so therefore they take up the pen. This doesn’t seem to fit with you."
Amy: "I suppose for anybody’s life there will be a certain level you get to where you could say, wouldn’t it have been better if such-and-such had worked out? It’s not that I feel my life has been a seamless floral print of successes going from one little flower to another. It was more of a wish to tell a story and to enter other lives. The first stories I wrote… I married young and started raising kids young, and perhaps there was some wish to go, what is it like to live other lives?"
Luke: "What are the principle rewards for you for writing?"
Amy: "The economic ones come and go. A good sentence and a good story are really a pleasure to me. It’s like building something. It’s solid and it’s there and it works every time you look at… I’m always very touched when readers say, this meant so much to me. I remember I was giving a lecture in Amsterdam and this guy, this probably 70 year old physician, came up to me, I had just published my first novel, and he said of the central character, ‘She is me. I understood her completely. The way she has approached her life is the way I have approached my life. Thank you.’
"I was so pleased that somebody so different from that character, and so touched that he would take the trouble to tell me… It’s lovely of people to be so engaged with the work."
Luke: "I have this fantasy that one of the great things about being Amy Bloom is that you can arrange dinners and coffees with other great writers."
Amy: "Well, that would be a terrible disappointment to you. In theory, sure, but I live in the middle of nowhere. It’s a tremendous pain in the ass for me to go see anyone or for anyone to come see me, but it’s nice to be friends with people who I can talk to about my kind of work. Mostly we are not talking about each other’s sentences. In theory, it would be nice to have coffee with a great writer but in fact the great writer may turn out to be an awful person and you’d be happy to not have coffee with them. You’d be happy to just read their book and be done with it. It was Swift who said that wanting to know the writer because you like the work is like wanting to know the chicken because you like the eggs."
Luke: "How is your writing different because you trained and practiced as a psycho-therapist?"
Amy: "I’m a better listener… I’m inclined to let people finish their own sentences. I’m trained to pay attention to people’s perceptions and notice the gaps between what they say and how they feel. My training reinforced my inclinations. I am by nature someone who likes to observe what is going on. I find people fascinating."
"I’m basically happy… I haven’t had any shortage of ups and downs and bad s—. People are born with certain kinds of dispositions. I feel things very deeply. I’ve had more than my share of thunderstorms but that hasn’t changed my sense of myself as being happy."
Luke: "How do you choose the photo for your books?"
Amy: "You don’t want to look homely… That’s about it. That’s a standard. You don’t want to look so good in the picture that when you walk into the book store, people have no idea who you are. You want to look good but if it will at least, please God, have a passing resemblance to yourself."
At the end of our interview, Amy says, "Thank you for bearing with me."
Related Links:
Pearl Abraham Elisa Albert Steve Almond Jonathan Ames Shalom Auslander Aimee Bender Karen Bender Amy Bloom Danit Brown Melvin Jules Bukiet Tamar Fox Naama Goldstein Rebecca Goldstein Yael Goldstein Laurie Graff Lauren Grodstein Ehud Havazelet Joanna Hershon Dara Horn Molly Jong-Fast Mitchell James Kaplan Binnie Kirshenbaum Sana Krasikov Adam Mansbach Tova Mirvis Gurumurthy Neelakantan Alana Newhouse Jon Papernick Rachel Resnick Thane Rosenbaum Elizabeth Rosner Wendy Shalit Ilana Stanger-Ross Laurie Gwen Shapiro Rochelle Shapiro Andrea Seigel Robert Siegel Terrie Silverman Margot Singer Leora Skolkin-Smith Yuri Slezkine Diana Spechler Steve Stern Ayelet Waldman Katharine Weber Tamar Yellin People of the Book Festival 2006
Yosef Abramowitz Edward Alexander Michael Berenbaum Sally Berkovic James Besser Reuven Blau Stephen Bloom Andrew Silow-Carroll Shmuley Boteach Benyamin Cohen Debra Nussbaum Cohen Robert Cohn Ami Eden Rob Eshman Larry Cohler-Esses Frances Dinkelspiel Matt Dorf Ami Eden Charles Fenyvesi Eric Fingerhut Amnon Finkelstein Sue Fishkoff Samuel Freedman Stephen Fried Robert I. Friedman Heshy Fried Jonathan Friendly Neal Gabler Evan Gahr J.J. Goldberg Ari Goldman Yossi Klein Halevi Malcolm Hoenlein Wayne Hoffman Hollywood Jews Mickey Kaus Eve Kessler Michael Kinsley Amy Klein Marc S. Klein Lisa S. Lenkiewicz Gene Lichtenstein Jason Maoz Jonathan Mark Deborah Dash Moore Alana Newhouse Gustav Niebuhr Ori Nir Steve Rabinowitz Gary Rosenblatt Jennie Rothenberg Debra Rubin Neil Rubin Walter Ruby Douglas Rushkoff Jonathan Sarna Cathy Seipp Rabbi Avi Shafran Mark Silk Sheldon Teitelbaum Jonathan Tobin Tom Tugend David Twersky Teresa Watanabe Steven I. Weiss Leon Wieseltier Paul Wilkes Lauren Winner Yori Yanover Larry Yudelson