The Millions

The Venom of Snakes: On Diane Williams

“No writer’s life is pain free,” Diane Williams says early one morning while discussing her forthcoming book of stories, How High?—That High. “Marketing aside, just doing the work is so punishing. It’s an athletic ordeal on every level.”

Williams is speaking via Zoom from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she writes six days a week. She is bathed in light from a window with a view and framed by bookshelves and an art collection (twice profiled in the Paris Review). Paintings and prints share space with sculptures and a crimson plague doctor mask Williams calls “terrifying.” Every piece is personal and tells a story, and she enjoys telling them.

The mask she found in Stockholm, at Drottningholm Palace theater, one

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