Printer
TextAnita Shreve
Bestselling author Anita Shreve was
interviewed for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director
Sam Clay. BookCast is sponsored by Dominion Resources through the Fairfax
Library Foundation.
Anita Shreve published her first novel, Eden Close, in 1989. Since then she has written 12 other novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, Body Surfing and most recently, Rescue.
Raised in Dedham, Mass., near Boston, she taught for a number of years after graduating from Tufts. She quit in the middle of her last year deciding it was “now or never” if she wanted to write. She began writing and publishing short fiction in literary journals and one of her stories even won an O’Henry Award. She eventually decided she couldn’t make a living writing short fiction (she jokes she could paper her wall with rejections for her short stories) and became a journalist. She lived in Kenya for three years working for an African magazine.
In 1999 she received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey and The Pilot’s Wife became an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. A film version of The Pilot’s Wife appeared on CBS in April 2002 and The Weight of Water was released in theaters later that year.
“The best analogy I can give to describe writing for me is daydreaming,” Shreve says. "A certain amount of craft is brought to bear, but the experience feels very dreamlike."
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