Back Draft: Antoine Wilson
As novelist Clarice Lispector once put it, “I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.” The sentiment could surely apply to countless novelists, though it’s especially fitting for Antoine Wilson. His latest book, Mouth to Mouth, recounts the rescue of a man drowning at sea. It’s a harrowing scene, vividly described in the excerpt above, but the most haunting part comes later. What exactly is the rescuer owed for his life-saving actions, and how far might he go to collect that debt?
When I spoke to Wilson about his revision process, I admitted that I missed some of the language from his early draft of that scene. He felt the same but suggested that a sense of loss is natural with revision. It’s all part of being a writer, he said.
One week after our phone interview, Wilson’s favorite living novelist, Javier Marías, passed away. I was grateful to have heard Wilson pay tribute to his writing while in our conversation: “[Marías] allows for lots of ambiguity in his work, and it reflects a consciousness that I find appealing.” During our conversation, ambiguity kept coming up. Saving a life, for example, can mean so many different things.
— Ben Purkert for Guernica
Can I be honest? I miss
