“Everything was ours, our reality untamed by time and misogyny, and the price we’d pay for living remained alien to us.”

“I’ve seen too much writing lately that makes metaphors of hunger.”

Lara Vapnyar discusses the “mysterious Russian soul”, childhood, and how she learned she is a powerful writer.

The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. Now, the narrator is sharing a sliver of that burden with the perpetrator, and they are both wearing it, or are about to, publicly: she as the author; he, as a man with a pseudonym who has willingly submitted to being interviewed by the woman he wronged when she was a girl.”