For Electric Literature, Dan Sheehan interviews novelist Mark Haddon about his recent short story collection The Pier Falls. The two also discuss why Haddon writes about family and domestic spaces:
When I began writing fiction I wanted to write big novels about big subjects and learned, painfully and slowly, that I had other, smaller subjects where I was at home, subjects that suited me. Family is one; houses is one; what goes on in the mind when it’s not working properly is another. I’ve had to give up on those dreams of writing the big novel and admit that I’m actually at home on this quite small scale. And given that stories simply don’t happen without flaws, suffering and conflict, if you’re writing about families, houses and minds then painfully escalating tension with family units in domestic spaces is pretty much essential.
