Saturday, August 5, 2023

made for each other

"In the early years at least, Kingsley and Jane seemed made for each other. It was an unusual and unusually stimulating menage: two passionately dedicated novelists who were also passionately in love. Their approach to the daily business of writing formed a clear contrast, one from which I derived a tentative theory between the difference between and male and female fiction. Kingsley was a grinder; no matter how he was feeling (sickly, clogged, loth — or plain hungover, if you prefer), he trudged off to his desk after breakfast; there was a half-hour lunchbreak, and that was that until it was time for evening drinks. Jane was far more spasmodic and compulsive. She would wander from room to room, she would do some cooking or some gardening, and plenty of smoking as she stared out of the sitting-room window with arms folded and an air of anxious preoccupation. Then she would suddenly hasten to her study, and you'd hear the clutter of her typewriter keys. Quite soon, she would shyly emerge, having written more in an hour than my father would write in a day."

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

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