"I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction"
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Lively’s sentence has the unshowy confidence of a writer who’s stopped pretending that genres are anything more than useful lies. She’s not announcing a bold “reinvention”; she’s describing craft logistics: one project is underway, the next already forming in the periphery. That calm sequencing matters. It suggests a working life governed less by inspiration than by continuity, the steady accumulation of attention.
The real charge sits in “maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.” “Strange” is doing double duty: it’s modesty (downplaying ambition) and a quiet provocation (hinting that the categories themselves are inadequate). Lively, long interested in memory, place, and the way time edits our personal archives, implies that the most truthful form may not be the pure novel or the pure memoir but the hybrid where a scene can be emotionally accurate without being legally notarized.
There’s subtext, too, about authority and aging. For a late-career novelist, moving toward essay, memoir, or “this again” (a return to a prior mode) can read as a surrender to fact. Lively frames it instead as a choice: fiction and non-fiction as ingredients, not opposing camps. The intent is pragmatic but the implication is cultural: we live in an era obsessed with “based on a true story,” yet suspicious of artifice. Lively offers a third way - a form that admits how we actually think, in shards of recollection, researched detail, and invented connective tissue.
The real charge sits in “maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.” “Strange” is doing double duty: it’s modesty (downplaying ambition) and a quiet provocation (hinting that the categories themselves are inadequate). Lively, long interested in memory, place, and the way time edits our personal archives, implies that the most truthful form may not be the pure novel or the pure memoir but the hybrid where a scene can be emotionally accurate without being legally notarized.
There’s subtext, too, about authority and aging. For a late-career novelist, moving toward essay, memoir, or “this again” (a return to a prior mode) can read as a surrender to fact. Lively frames it instead as a choice: fiction and non-fiction as ingredients, not opposing camps. The intent is pragmatic but the implication is cultural: we live in an era obsessed with “based on a true story,” yet suspicious of artifice. Lively offers a third way - a form that admits how we actually think, in shards of recollection, researched detail, and invented connective tissue.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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