Maria is interviewed in The Boston Globe, which describes This is How as ‘extraordinary’.
The full interview is online here.
Here’s a quick extract:
Q: How did Patrick Oxtby arrive in your head?
A: I read Tony Parker’s book “Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers’’ and I was struck by the case of a young man who lived in a lodging house and who killed a fellow lodger for no good reason. I wanted to write his story. Around that time, I had also reread [Albert] Camus’s “The Outsider,’’ Peter Handke’s novel “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,’’ which is a direct response to “The Outsider,’’ and Andre Gide’s “The Vatican Cellars.’’ The idea of an unprovoked, unpremeditated murder has always interested me, and there was great dramatic potential in the boarding house setting, the aimless young man, the fellow lodger who irritates him. I wanted to put those pieces together and write a hyper-realistic but dreamlike tragedy.
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