Vulpes Libris has published an interview with Maria.
You can read the full interview (by Lisa Glass) here.
Here’s a little taster:
LG: Yes. Your characters are young and appear to be exploring what’s what in the world. They also seem uncomfortable in their own bodies. I’m thinking of Patrick’s physical awkwardness, Lou’s emerging sexual power and tendency to blush and her voyeurism and John’s abnormal height and…
MJH: I think the insistent bewilderment about being alive goes hand in hand with physical awkwardness. I think, therefore, I’ll always give my characters some kind of deformity (small or large) as a kind of motif, if nothing else, to highlight or reinforce this lack of ease. Ultimately, I want to write tragedy; good, arresting tragedy. I want to achieve a plain authenticity of tragedy, in unadorned prose, the writer made invisible, with all artifice hidden. I want, also, to deal in the ‘unconscious life of the mind’ (to borrow a phrase from Knut Hamsun.) And to this end, my characters will always have something conspicuously wrong with them; mind and body, but not so grotesquely as to become characters that a reader can’t readily identify with.
