Marilynne Robinson, Obama’s favourite contemporary novelist, says we all have a duty to raise our intellectual game
As a child Marilynne Robinson was enthralled by writing poetry. As an adult, she says, it has never been quite the same. ‘During a thunderstorm or something like that I would write some crazy poem and then hide it. It was wonderful.’ She hid the poetry under her mattress. ‘My mother would come in to change the sheets and all this poetry would fly out,’ she recalls. ‘She would say: “Why are you hiding your poetry?” I’ve never known why. But I’m still like that. I’m pretty secretive about anything I write.’
She says she’s two-thirds of the way through her fourth novel. When I ask more about it, she laughs and almost puts her head in her hands. ‘I can’t talk about it. I can’t… For some reason or another that just destroys fiction when you talk about it prematurely, at least for me.’
Robinson has never published any of her poems. ‘I grew up and my poetry really did not,’ she says. But her novels are the kind that a poet might write, representing fairly everyday moments as moving and sad and beautiful.
Her first, Housekeeping, came out in 1980; it took 24 years before she wrote a second, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer. In between the two she raised a family and taught creative writing in Iowa. More recently, she has been prolific, producing two collections of essays and another prize-winning novel, Home, over four years. She is divorced and her two children are grown up and married, so she is free to work; plus, she doesn’t do leisure time. ‘If I’m working on something I want to be working on, nothing could interest me less than leisure.
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