Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Parakeet (NYTimes Editor's Choice) and 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the short story collection Safe as Houses. Awards include The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Prize, The Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship and The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, Granta, Guernica, BOMB, among many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was the Walter E. Dakin fellow. In June 2021, "Disrupting Realism," an online master class and panel she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people. She has taught in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Yale University. Her fourth book, the novel Beautyland, will be published in January 2024 by FSG. More info: www.mariehelenebertino.com
“Bob Dylan never has his own cigarettes. I thought this was charming at first.”
“I was fond of him immediately, in the way we feel kinship to those who compliment us.”
“We stand at the doors and look out over the yard. Hundreds of deer gaze back at us. Deer and deer and deer and deer and deer. Their blue chests heave in the dark. Their trembling cotton throats.”
“I am quitting a boy like some people quit smoking. I am not quitting smoking.”
“When you're alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.”
“I am bad at asking for help. When you ask a human being for help, there is a chance they will say later, Remember when you asked for help? Can I have five dollars? That goes for medicine, too. I don't like asking help from pills in a bottle. I don't want to be woken up at night by a tab of aspirin asking to borrow five dollars.”
“He's dead now and by dead I mean dating a stripper.”
“That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself as boredom.”
“Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.”
“Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man. Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her.”
“Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.”
“A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results.”
“They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses.”