Emily Rapp Recommends...

"I am inspired by love, which sounds simplistic and dreamy, but in my case is brutally real. My son, Ronan, is nearly two years old and has Tay-Sachs, a disease that is always fatal and results in a slow regression into a vegetative state before death by age three. The kind of love that inspires me is the one that acknowledges the great loss that comes with it—that you can’t have one without the other. This love requires a daily acknowledgment of death-in-life that so many of us try to avoid and that now, as a writer, I face full on, every day. 

Living with anticipatory grief has made me a more authentic writer, a writer who understands that all the neurotic, spinning thoughts that used to plague me about process, character, plot, and career, pale in comparison to the directive that Ronan has given me: to write like my life depends on it, because his, in fact, does. I am writing the myth of his life, and I’m writing it while looking right at him. So I write in love, but not in romantic love or in puppy love or in the love of bunnies and hearts, but in a blaze of fury and euphoria and necessity."
—Emily Rapp, author of Poster Child (Bloomsbury, 2007)


http://www.pw.org/