Horse latitudes
There was a time, when I was about thirty-five and began to feel more or less safe from her, that I thought that wild young woman I had been in my twenties could be my literary stock in trade. But she hadn’t panned out – others, it seemed, didn’t find her as fascinating a character type as I did – and so I blamed her for my deepening obscurity. Once Lord of Misrule did so well, I was glad to acknowledge my maternity, so to speak. What interests me about her? She’s an American romantic, a drifter, a seeker of adventure, but adventure looks different on women than it looks on men, likewise drifting from lover to lover, place to place. I think that, like Robert Stone, I like to put my protagonists into peril of their lives because only then will they begin to fight for them, and to wake to the fact that maybe this was their purpose all along. But this trait too looks different in women than it looks in men.
Thomas Bunstead interviews Jaimy Gordon.