INTERVIEWER
The End of the Alphabet deals with many of these issues. This is a book about someone going through or having gone through trauma, deep pain, or dislocation. We never know exactly what the dislocation is, but the source isn't important, what's important is the experience. It highlights the tension between narrative and moment as overtly as any of your books.

RANKINE
When I set out to write that book, I specifically wanted to address the question, How do you write about the feeling of devastation that we all share? You meet people and you know they've had some kind of traumatic loss, something destructive in their lives. You intuit that without knowing their story. You don't have to know anything about them, you just know. I thought, Why can't I write a book that is less concerned with narrative but centralizes this feeling beyond it? The narrative could have been twenty years ago, it could have been the Holocaust, it could have been anything, but the feeling of past trauma is communicated by whoever is standing in front of you – that's what stays real.

Claudia Rankine: The Art of Poetry No. 102, Interviewed by David L. Ulin in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER
Let's talk about how this works in Citizen. On the one hand, we've got Serena in a lyric essay. Then there are the passages at the beginning, those short pieces written in the second person – the girl who doesn't want to sit next to the woman on the plane because she's African American, the coworker who mistakes her for someone else and then refers to it as "our mistake." Those, too, are lyric moments. Traditionally, we associate the lyric with autobiography, but here the second person opens up the writing so that it becomes a collective experience.

RANKINE
When I first sit down to write, these movements are all intuitive. Just this morning, for example, I was listening to the recording of the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, and the little girl, the four-year-old in the backseat of the car, says, "It's okay, Mommy, I'm right here with you." I wrote it down. That will be the beginning of something. Every time I watch that video, my eyes tear up, my throat closes. I hear that little girl, and I am transported to a place beyond my intellect. I'm no longer thinking about the policemen – I'm experiencing that child and her utterance. When a moment enters me that profoundly, I know I can wait to write because I'll forever be in dialogue with the moment. That part of the process I don't interfere with. I will be surprised and ready to begin when her voice makes its way into a piece.

Claudia Rankine: The Art of Poetry No. 102, Interviewed by David L. Ulin in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER
And yet, both of those people would likely describe themselves as well-intentioned, even allies of yours.

RANKINE
They came and they engaged. I have a lot more patience and curiosity than I used to for following those arguments, for seeing where they will go. Often somebody will be interrupted by another member of the audience, who will jump in to shut that person down. This either comes out of an intent to protect me or else they're just impatient with a line of thinking they don't agree with. I don't know. But one of the things I do know is that you're not going to change anybody's mind by shutting them down.

Claudia Rankine: The Art of Poetry No. 102, Interviewed by David L. Ulin in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER
How did you decide to put the dialogue in contemporary English?

MANTEL
[excerpt from her answer] ...Sometimes there just isn't a Tudor word for what you want, and then you have to think hard – if no word, could they have had the thought? Boredom, for example, that doesn't seem right. Were they never bored? But tedium, they know. And somehow ennui seems fine. Sometimes words play tricks, change their meaning. Let doesn't mean "allow," it means "forbid." They call a doll a "baby" often as not. They call a clever man "witty." It doesn't mean he can make jokes. So you can't be slavishly literal. You can try to be authentic.
     Of course, I'm very concerned about not pretending they're like us. That's the whole fascination – they're just not. It's the gap that's so interesting. And then there are other ways in which they are like us.

Hilary Mantel: The Art of Fiction No. 226, Interviewed by Mona Simpson in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER
The last novel you wrote was The Last Thing He Wanted. That came out in 1996. Had you been working on it for a long time?

DIDION
[excerpt from her answer] ...I had begun to lose patience with the conventions of writing. Descriptions went first; in both fiction and nonfiction, I just got impatient with those long paragraphs of description. By which I do not mean – obviously – the single detail that gives you the scene. I'm talking about description as a substitute for thinking. I think you can see me losing my patience as early as Democracy. That was why that book was so hard to write.

Joan Didion: The Art of Nonfiction No. 1, Interviewed by Hilton Als in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review