La Muselivre

INTERVIEWER
There's a similar lucidity in the children's books and the adult books, and I wonder if there isn't some connection there. Children, after all, are famously good at detecting when an adult is lying, and so many of your adult books are concerned with the hypocrisy of adults.

PAULA FOX
I think it has something to do with my sense of other people and myself. I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl. My childhood was a difficult one so I was able to observe the bowl and the water and the algae and everything else from a very early age. Also, as I said, I read a lot.
[...] I remember saying after I'd seen A Streetcar Named Desire, when it first opened, "It's true all the way down, the people are true all the way down." I didn't know what I meant, and I don't even know what I mean now but I think I mean what you're talking about. There is a kind of central truth and if you get the central truth, and the motion of people, then the rest is implied. Henry James talks about this in The Art of Fiction. He writes about a woman writer he knew who ran up the stairs of a little French house in Paris, and on her way up she passed a room with a door open and inside there was a meeting going on of French Huguenots—this was in the nineteenth century—and they were smoking cigarettes and talking. She was only there for half a minute; she paused and then she went on. Two or three years later she wrote a book about the Huguenots, and everything in it, as Henry James said, was absolutely true. She just went from that one moment. Now, I was very careful not to tell my students to only write about what you know, because I couldn't define what they knew. That's where the question really begins. How to define what you know. And what she knew and sensed in that second was everything.

Extrait d'une interview de Paula Fox, auteur de livres pour enfants et adultes (et accessoirement grand-mère de Courtney Love, elle-même peut-être petite-fille de Brando : les potins, c'est bien !), dans la Paris Review.