Margot Livesey
Margot grew up in a boys' private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published in Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published nine novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury and The Boy in the Field. She has also published The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. Her tenth novel, The Road from Belhaven, will be published by Knopf in February, 2024.
Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
“All along, he'd been looking in the wrong direction, trying to make time stand still, to re-create the past, but everything in life taught the opposite.”
“Since the accident, Jonathan had noticed, she held on to things, a doorframe, a chair, as it either she or the world needed steadying.”
“Running, I soon realized, was the best way to stay ahead of fear.”
“She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2,or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls.”
“As far as I'm concerned it's the other way round. We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free.”
“loves was about the people who loved you”
“he said everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life”
“so often my own emotions were hidden not only from other people but from myself. or perhaps it was the other way round: i was hiding from them. ”