“I’m just a random white gal raised upper-middle class. But to think that I am disconnected only allows for the continuation of a system that benefits from my ignorance.”

A conversation with Terese Svoboda about her latest book, Hitler and My Mother in Law, and how writing through uncertainty and using humor to face the unbearable truths history leaves behind.

“Writing fiction is like controlled daydreaming, whereas writing nonfiction is more like putting together a complicated three-dimensional puzzle.”

“A couple of years ago, you invited me to edit one of your issues, and that was a very different experience. For the first time I was not the one asking to be published….I took the job very seriously. I wanted to do for writers what other writers and editors had done for me.”

“I think what's important is to look at your own obsessions, whether it's a family tale that you remember and wonder about, like some missing great grandmother whom you’ve heard stories about, or maybe something happened in your town years ago, and you thought, well, that's a weird story.”

"My stories often start with some image or moment that stays with me... It could be something I experienced, or a conversation I overheard, or the way someone looked at someone else… I will usually just start writing toward that image or moment and build from there."

“There is often a bleakness that permeates Hebrew fiction, and certainly a much darker sense of humor, a lot of sarcasm and irony, as well as self-deprecation. These are less prevalent in most English writing…”

"If I were to even write it today, it would be a very different book. It might be better in some ways, but it would be probably less emotionally true to how I was feeling."

“Writing really resists optimization and that’s partly why I love it. It makes me reevaluate how I conceive of ‘time well spent.’”