Satrapi Profile

The incomparable (and eminently quotable) Marjane Satrapi is interviewed in The Independent.

“Joseph Heller once said that he’d succeeded ‘despite that great handicap for a novelist, a happy childhood’.”

“Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.”

“Even if it meant not writing?”

“Definitely. Because I would have been happy. But when you’re dropped in a pile of shit, so to speak, you have to decide – either add to the pile, or use it as fertiliser, and grow flowers.”

Her newest graphic novel to appear in the U.S. is Chicken with Plums, translated by Anjali Singh.