Wednesday, June 20, 2018

NELL FREUDENBERGER | WRITER, MY CITY, BROKLYN

HOME: Brooklyn is heterogeneous in wonderful and disturbing ways, which makes it a fascinating place to be a writer. Rich and poor people live in close proximity. It’s also culturally diverse in the extreme. BROOKYLN OR…? I’d love to live in Mumbai. I stayed there for a few months years ago. I’ve never walked around a city that varies so much by neighborhood. I like the mash-up of architectural styles, and the feeling that you’re in a place where history runs very deep, but which is also so dramatically modern. SLICE OF LIFE: I’m a little embarrassed about how stimulating travel is for me as a writer: I feel I ought to be able to find inspiration at home. What  I love about going somewhere very different, whether nearby or abroad, is the way I start to notice the details of ordinary life. When I was just out of college I spent a summer living with an eccentric woman in New Delhi whose love went to great lengths to get European-style cheese for her. They would sit a t a dusty table in her living room in the afternoons, talking and eating cheese. It was that table with the plate of cheese on it that inspired the first successful story I ever wrote.

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