King was eleven years old when her parents divorced. Her father remarried a woman with 3 children; 5 years later they divorced and he remarried a woman with 4 children. King’s mother re-married a man with 7 children. Thus, King spent her time going back and forth between the 2 families; her extended family now included 16 brothers, sisters, stepbrothers, and stepsisters. In mixing these family systems she learned to adjust to the language, the mores and the taboos of each family “or tribe” – often switching her behavior to adapt.
“I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all. One family would eat all together, and in another family, you’re on your own. Even though they were all in my hometown, they had different cultures, different ideas of what was acceptable behavior. When you’re in a situation like that early on, you really become an observer. You watch and see how it’s done. When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation. Maybe that has something to do with my interest in writing about anthropologists. That’s a life I would love to lead.” (From an interview for Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, March 2015)
King has a graduate degree in creative writing; her first post graduate job was teaching English in a bilingual school in Valencia, Spain. Lily King has lived in Paris for 2 years, Spain for 2 years and Italy for 1 year. She has traveled all over Europe, China, Peru, and Mexico. She loves languages, and loves learning languages and would like to learn German someday.
“Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can’t really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I don’t know why that is. But my sentences are longer. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I’m writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love. It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one’s going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes. Then when I put it on the computer, a different part of my brain kicks in and I really evaluate every single word and sentence and make decisions.” (Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, March 2015)
Did Lily King create an alternate believable world for you as the reader? Come join the discussion on January 5.