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Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker Books

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The Dreamers

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“Later, I would come to think of those first days as a time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, the West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

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Author:Karen Thompson Walker
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“I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I'd failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary.”

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Book:The Age of Miracles
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“Want to come over this weekend?’ I asked. ‘I can’t,’ she said. I didn’t like the way she didn’t look up from her phone while she talked. I was sure she was sending messages to Tracey, who, no doubt, was sending similar communiques right back. ‘Why are you being like this?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. She smiled a little and bit her lower lip. Her long blond braid dangled on her shoulder. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I’m not doing anything.’ Something about the coyness in her face felt familiar. In that moment I recalled a pale redhead named Alison who had been Hanna’s best friend before me. This was years earlier, fourth grade, but I remembered the way Alison used to float toward us on the playground sometimes, how Hanna would ignore her while we practiced our tricks on the bars where there was room for only two. ‘I’m so sick of her,’ Hanna would say to me whenever she saw Alison approaching, and then she would look at Alison with the same fake smile that she was now using on me.”

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Book:The Age of Miracles
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“These words: if classes were in session, today is the day Nathaniel would have done his lecture on the pheromones of trees. It’s a way of catching the attention of the undergraduates for a minute with the counterintuitive news the trees, so silent and so still, have ways of reaching out to one another, lines of communication, systems of warning. There is something satisfying in it, that the plain reality of the universe reads to us like magic. Henry might go further. He would point out how much our brains are limited by what we believe already - how once, when people expected to see ghosts, ghosts were what they saw. Henry’s presence in the house, and in these words, triggers a second longing, too, a profound need for his daughter to be here, and not just as she is now - a grown woman in San Francisco, whom he calls on the phone to say yes, yes, it really is amazing - but also as she was once: a six-year-old girl in blue butterfly barrettes , trailing behind him and Henry, as she did on so many evenings back then, out in these same woods, reciting the names of the trees like catechism, ponderosa, manzanita, white oak, her pockets bulging with pinecones. His daughter, as she is now, the grown woman in San Francisco, does not seem to understand what he is trying to tell her on the phone. “He’s cured?” She says. “How is that possible?” She has a lot of questions that he does not want to consider. A rush of anger comes over him, washing everything else away. “Just leave it,” he says to her. “Just leave it alone.”

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Book:The Dreamers
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“What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that he gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were housed in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we’re all built a little bit that way. But most of us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful. When I think now of that moment in the kitchen, an almost unbelievable thought comes to my mind: There was a time when those two people - that man hunched at the table and that woman shouting in a bathrobe - were young. The proof was in the pictures that hung on the living room walls, a pretty girl and a bookish guy, a studio apartment in a crumbling Hollywood building overlooking a courtyard and a kidney-shaped pool. This was the mythical period before I was born, when my mother was not a mother and was instead an actress who might make it someday/. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointment, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible. I like to think about how my parents’ lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined - and they never imagined this.”

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Book:The Age of Miracles
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“Certain thoughts Rebecca keeps to her self, like how can anyone say for sure that the other life was the dream, and not this one? But what instrument can she ascertain these moments right here - with her girl on her lap, looking up so sweetly, those cheeks, her first tooth - are not part of a strange and pleasant dream she is dreaming in old age?”

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Book:The Dreamers
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“I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.”

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Book:The Age of Miracles
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“This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.”

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Book:The Age of Miracles
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“As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.”

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Author:Karen Thompson Walker
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“End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.”

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Author:Karen Thompson Walker
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