Nicole krauss husband

Interview

Nicole Krauss explains what inspired her to write A History of Love.

I started to write The History of Love in the spring of 2002, just after my first novel was published. It was a strange time: wonderful, but also melancholy. Something about the feeling of writing seemed to change for me once the book was published. I felt, a bit, as if I'd lost something hard to put my finger on, something personal and natural that I'd loved about writing. I was working on a new book, but my heart wasn't quite in it. So one day I decided to throw away the hundred or so pages I had. I wanted to give up my old ideas about writing - or at least about trying to write well - and just write something for myself. To no end. A nothing.

Soon after that, Leo's voice appeared on the page. It was so familiar to me: at once the easiest thing I'd ever written, and also the most alive. Sometimes I even confused his voice with my own, or was unable to tell us apart; strange to say, considering he's an eighty-year-old man from Poland. But with the arrival of Leo's voice, I found a way to write about things that were personal without being autobiographical. To me that's an important distinction. If I were to write an autobiographical sentence about this moment, I ...