Jillian Medoff (August 21, 1963) is an American writer of literary fiction.
My novels are never truly finished, even if they're published and sitting on the shelf. While I may no longer be interested in spending time with that particular set of characters, I can't help but think about all the ways the book could be different, the small, insignificant tweaks that no one but me would ever notice.
Part of what compels me to write day after day, chapter after chapter, is the discovery process, seeing the characters evolve as I get deeper and deeper into the story.
To be honest, I want readers to be wrung out. As a novelist, I don't have a political agenda or specific philosophy; I'm trying to create a gut-wrenching, intimate, memorable experience.
What I like to do and what I have to do are two separate things. I like to read, swim, watch TV, spend time with my family. But I have to work, so I do that.
If a book has a predictable storyline or familiar situations, there's little satisfaction for me in writing it. A woman deciding which man she'll spend her life with? I've read that story a million times, but a stepmother deciding which of her children she'll save in a freak accident? Now that's a challenge.
There's constant drama, and I'm busy, busy, but at the center of the madness is the desire to write, the need to write. That desire, that need, is as palpable and relentless as any junkie's craving, and will possess me all day until I can park myself in a chair and do my work.
My only relief is to sleep. When I'm sleeping, I'm not sad, I'm not angry, I'm not lonely, I'm nothing.
Sometimes you have to say, 'Today's just not my day.
I love it, I hate it, it's ecstasy when I'm writing well, it's despair when I'm not. I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, nor would I, could I, ever give it up.
To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category.
I've always been a writer who tackles complex themes and risky subjects - I write about the things that people think but never say aloud.
My entire life has been centered around my writing, and by that I mean finding the time to write.
I think there's an unnatural amount of social pressure on women, particularly mothers, to conform to certain standards of behavior, particularly in regard to our children.
I hope I'll keep people up at night, unable to stop turning pages. That's my goal: exhausted, emotionally drained readers who can't stop crying.
As a writer who happens to be a woman, I am constantly devalued - even by other writers who happen to be women - simply because of a marketing decision. Am I truly less talented, less audacious, less erudite, less brave than my more quote-unquote literary colleagues?