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Patrick Somerville

Patrick Somerville Biography

Novelist

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“A week goes by and I don't call Lucy or Dylan. I want to drift away from them - more than anything, I want to drift away. I sometimes imagine myself totally alone and I enjoy the feeling. And I mean something by alone, something more than the word holds. I mean something blank and pure and vacant, plus me. And also moral. This blank and pure vacancy that includes me that is also moral is so empty, it is so no one, that my presence in it makes me not exist, although I am still there, and that's what lifts all the weight.”

AloneAlonenessDrifting Apart
Book:The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
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“Puzzles are great because they're fun. But really we are drawn to puzzles because they can be solved. We love the idea of being able to put a puzzle together and it being complete: you do it perfectly, step away, and you've completed the job. There's a deep satisfaction from that, and I think we wish for the ability to do that with everything. But emotions just don't work that way, people don't work that way, relationships don't work that way.”

PeopleThinkingTogetherFunWishAbilityEmotionPuzzles
Author:Patrick Somerville
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“I feel like I've been lucky that I've never been put in a situation where I had to keep a serious secret. But what is true of me - and has to be true of everyone who's ever been in a family - is that our idealization of reality when we're children always has to fall apart. It's the narratives we didn't know about that pop up and redraw reality. You have to be able to integrate secrets into who you are. My family does not look now like it does when I was a kid. There was divorce. There were family secrets. There was definitely a difference between what I thought was true and what was true.”

ChildrenRealityKidsFallSecretSituationSeriousLuckyMy FamilyWho You AreDivorceBeing TrueFalling ApartIntegrating
Author:Patrick Somerville
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“I don't think of love in terms of relationships. It happens in terms of seconds, but it goes away like that, too. I pass a nurse, I love her, it ends when I go around a corner; at a restaurant I see a forlorn man at the table next to me, and I love him, and the conversation pulls me back, and it's ended. A patient comes in, and she is sick, and I love her, and then she dies, and I never see her again. This is what I live for. Don't think that it's sad.”

Author:Patrick Somerville
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