It's the birthday of writer Nell Freudenberger (books by this author), born in New York City (1975).
After graduating from Harvard, she turned down a job offer from Random House and instead spent a year teaching English to teenagers in Thailand. She said, "I didn't really have anything to say about being an American until I went and lived in that high school." After Thailand, she traveled in India, then came home and got a job at The New Yorker. She wrote every morning before work, and one day she started a story about an American woman in Delhi coping with the death of her married Indian lover. She said, "I liked working on that story because it wasn't work; it was simply an hour and fifteen minutes of nostalgia every morning, before I got on the train to go to my real job." A year later, that story, "Lucky Girls," was published in The New Yorker, and it sparked a bidding war for a book. Lucky Girls, a collection of five stories, was published in 2003, followed by a novel, The Dissident (2006).
After graduating from Harvard, she turned down a job offer from Random House and instead spent a year teaching English to teenagers in Thailand. She said, "I didn't really have anything to say about being an American until I went and lived in that high school." After Thailand, she traveled in India, then came home and got a job at The New Yorker. She wrote every morning before work, and one day she started a story about an American woman in Delhi coping with the death of her married Indian lover. She said, "I liked working on that story because it wasn't work; it was simply an hour and fifteen minutes of nostalgia every morning, before I got on the train to go to my real job." A year later, that story, "Lucky Girls," was published in The New Yorker, and it sparked a bidding war for a book. Lucky Girls, a collection of five stories, was published in 2003, followed by a novel, The Dissident (2006).
She said: "I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private — a comforting thought. If you can make that distinction in your head, you can write just the way you always did, even after you start publishing books."
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