Hidden (Richard Russo)

In my fiction I’m always looking for what is concealed. All sorts of things get hidden for all kinds of reasons, conscious and subconscious. Big things like murder, theft, adultery. The big things we hide from the world make for great drama because they often trail equally large consequences, but I’m often more interested in smaller secrets we hide from other people and from ourselves—fears, joys, tiny shards of shame—that we protect and nurture, growing them in the dark, like mushrooms, until they’re no longer small. The little lies we tell ourselves that over time corrode our moorings, set us adrift, sometimes even kill us. Much of my recent fiction has dealt with relatively small lies and deceptions—a man who steals a letter from his beloved wife to an old friend, hides it in a desk drawer and then teaches himself to forget it’s there; another man who’ll do anything to show his parents his disdain for everything they stand for, hiding from himself over a lifetime the terrible truth that he loves them; an elderly nun who joins a writing class in order to tell her life story, only to discover that she’s willfully concealed from herself the inescapable meaning of the evidence she presents.

Writing stories is for me a series of thrilling investigations into the recesses of the human heart where the secrets, large and small, are kept. Because our characters not only want to keep secrets from others, but also from us. And why not? When we spy on the hearts of people we create, are we not really spying on our own, on the very things, large and small, that it’s difficult, sometimes impossible, to own up to? The result of such investigations, when they don’t destroy us, can be wisdom.

Pour citer cette ressource :

Richard Russo, "Hidden (Richard Russo)", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), mai 2014. Consulté le 20/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/entretiens-et-textes-inedits/hidden-richard-russo-