Tag Archives: character interview

My name is Sophie. In all of the worlds I know, I am one of three children. There is me, and there is Helen, and then Francis Patrick. We were all born in the teens of the century, … the … Continue reading →

What shocked me was that my father raised his hand to my mother. I saw that, and I saw as well that she suddenly wasn’t there, but across the room, and she said that she would not live like that. … Continue reading →

Then there’s the other thing they call love, which was rather longer in coming. There were girls my age, but they were not our kind, nor we theirs. No one ever spoke it aloud, but it was understood, and I … Continue reading →

I loved my mother, and my father as much as he would let me. But the first I really fell in love was when I was ten, and I got a baby sister and a kitten in the same day. … Continue reading →

I was twelve, the traditional age of apprenticeship, and my little sister was two, when my mother called me to the workbench and said that it was time. I had loved to watch her, of course, when I was small. … Continue reading →

This house is a fortress and a prize and a trap. I’ll sacrifice it willingly if it will draw the fire of our enemies and thereby reduce their strength. I think it will be a while before they figure out … Continue reading →

I can feel the grain of things. I don’t want to say that I talk to ghosts, but the evidence speaks to me much more eloquently. I am swifter to follow along to the place where the decisive thing lies; … Continue reading →

Twilight, in the summer, slightly unreal. In a rowboat, on a lake. My parents’ friends have a cabin, which reminds me a little bit of a dacha in a Chekhov story, especially the banality of the conversation on the dock. … Continue reading →

  Character is revealed in action. If you fail those tests, you fail decisively. Think of the ones who stood by while their neighbors were rounded up, the ones who couldn’t see it coming and didn’t object to the rhetoric … Continue reading →

Those bedrooms stand empty, a reproach to me for the ones I couldn’t save. I could have persuaded them, if I’d known then what I know now. The English situation was deteriorating fast. When I didn’t hear from them by … Continue reading →