At Electric Literature, Heather Scott Partington interviews former Rumpus Sunday Editor (and forever friend) Gina Frangello about her latest novel, Every Kind of Wanting. They discuss other writers who have influenced her work, the emotional truths that literary fiction can get at, and the duality of her characters:
Characters have to breathe and bleed. In order to do so, they can’t be object lessons or political agendas or allegories. Writers have to be fearless and irreverent about anyone whose skin they crawl inside on the page — I would rather make spectacular mistakes, ambitiously and out of love for and intimacy with the characters I’m portraying — than to create something bland and safe and reductively instructional.
