Keeping Time with Ann Napolitano

We talk about time as if it’s fixed, but most of us know it’s anything but. An hour can stretch or disappear depending on what life asks of us, and very few novelists make that instability feel as precise as Ann Napolitano.

Curating the quote library for Author Clock has focused my attention to how writers render all 1,440 minutes of the day. So when I sat down to talk with author Ann Napolitano, our conversation naturally gravitated toward the subject of time, especially how she builds it into her fiction and what it means for a character to live inside it. And the more she talked about writing, the more her sense of time revealed itself to be elastic, interior, and inseparable from both her process and how her characters move through the worlds she creates.

“Writing is basically all I ever want to do. It’s this place that I get to go to where time disappears.” —Ann Napolitano

In her novels Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward, clocks, injuries, flights, and ordinary minutes all color how a life can be lived or altered. Our conversation covered the strange hours of airplane travel, the way illness can seem to knock time off its axis, and what it means for writing itself to make the clock disappear. Napolitano now keeps both an Author Clock and an Author Forecast at home, which made her an ideal person to ask what it means to live and write inside a life where time both governs everything and still has the power to vanish.

-Yasmin 

Read the full article on Substack. 

Watch the interview on Youtube.