In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life.” — T. C. Boyle, The Barnes & Noble Review
The Inner Circle, a novel by T.C. Boyle. Penguin. 432 pages. T.C. Boyle has a gift for bringing to life historical figures in his fiction. He did it to John Harvey Kellogg in his comedic novel The Road to Wellville, made into a movie by the same name, and he does it more movingly in The Inner Circle, also turned into a film, about Alfred Kinsey, whose sex research at Indiana University transformed scientific inquiry and helped change Americans’ sexual …
from the “Letters to a Young Writer” series in Narrative Magazine “I am socially engaged, unlike many of my contemporaries, and I take on a whole variety of issues, yes, but increasingly I have found myself coming back to the central one of the environment, and, by extension, the meaning of our lives in the face of an indifferent universe. How and why do we master the other species? How long will our tenure be? Why have we evolved the …