'One of the key things of books like To Kill a Mockingbird and A Separate Peace that stuck with me,' she said, 'was the sense that there is responsibility in literature: that you should not just be writing for the fun of writing, but you should really be trying to influence the way that people live in the world.' There her writing and reading were further encouraged by 'some amazing high-school English teachers, who just made it seem like there was no more important thing to do than write and reflect on the world around you.'Īmong Revoyr's favorite writers during her years at Culver City High School - 'a big, urban, larger-minority, not-very-well-off public school' - were Harper Lee, John Knowles, James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, and Shakespeare.

'The fact that I had teachers and babysitters when I was six, seven, eight, nine, giving me books instead of toys, reading to me instead of watching TV with me, was incredibly influential.'Īt nine, Nina Revoyr moved to Los Angeles, where she spent her adolescence. 'They were a complete godsend, in retrospect,' said the 33-year-old author. Revoyr was encouraged in her childhood efforts by a couple of babysitters and 'teacher-mentors' who instilled in her a love for books. Part of the reason I'm drawn to writing novels, as opposed to shorter pieces, is that I really like creating a completely alternative, different, more exciting life for myself.' 'And in some ways, I think that the impetus that I had when I was eight is probably the same impetus I have now.

So I basically started writing an alternate world for myself to move around in, just a place to exist and work things out. Didn't have kids to play with, all that kind of stuff. Faced some pretty intense lack of acceptance, and racism, in the neighborhood. I was the only non-white kid in the community where I was living. 'I'd moved to the States recently, I didn't speak great English' (Revoyr's mother was Japanese, her father Polish-American) 'but perhaps most importantly. 'I didn't really fit in, where I was,' Revoyr said of her central-Wisconsin childhood. It was in Wisconsin, though, around age seven, that Revoyr - author of the novel Southland (Akashic), a Book Sense 76 pick for May/June - first began to write, in order to create a fictional place in which to feel more at home. By Joan Didion, born in Sacramento.Īnd now, in the 21st century, by Nina Revoyr: born in Japan and raised in Wisconsin, before moving to L.A. The literature of Los Angeles is written by outsiders.īy Raymond Chandler, for instance, of Illinois, by way of England.

The necessary hunger by nina revoyr