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Fox: Yes, there was a difference, perhaps in the sense of light placement—what is lit differently in my fiction and in my memoir.

LRS: Could you give an example of this "lighting" technique?

Fox: I'll try. My Uncle Fermin had married a peasant woman whom I wrote about in A Servant's Tale. In the novel, she dies of heart trouble. She swats at cockroaches in the dismal kitchen. I 'used' her in a certain way by exaggerating her qualities, putting her, Elpidia, in a different light, or by moving a light, casting different shadows that emphasized different aspects of what I imagined to be her nature. By the time I had finished writing about her, she would have been unrecognizable to her own children!

LRS: Speaking of lighting, both Borrowed Finery and Poor George have been made into movies (Poor George in Portuguese!). Did you have anything at all to do with the productions? And how did the films compare to your expectations of them?

Fox: I had nothing to do with either of them, didn't much care for Desperate Characters and never saw Poor George. Though I liked Frank Gilroy who wrote and directed the screenplay of the first mentioned.

LRS: Has anyone thought to make a film of any of your other books?

Fox: No, though Frank said he'd love to make a film of The Widow's Children if he weren't so old!

LRS: On days that you write, do you read as well?

Fox: Yes, after work. I tend now and then to work in the AM when my energy is highest. I read thrillers when I'm at work, like Georges Simenon and the Swedish writer Henning Mankell, and I used to love Eric Ambler.

LRS: What are the books you've returned to over the years as a reader—your essential texts?

Fox: Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, Tolstoi, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Proust, and Turgenev. I got such delight from The Mayor of Casterbridge and A Sportsman's Sketchbook; Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock; and Tender is the Night, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace (I only just finished reading it for the second time recently).

LRS: What are you working on now?

Fox: I have the book—The Coldest Winter—about my year in liberated Europe being published in the fall. I'm working on a novella, A Light in the Farmhouse Window.

LRS: The writer Steven Millhauser has said of novels that they are "hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world." The attraction of the novella, for him, is that "it lets the short story breathe. It invites the possibility of certain elaborations and complexities forbidden by a very short form, while at the same time it holds out the promise of formal perfection." What has been your experience so far?

Fox: No, I don't feel he's right about "hungry—monstrous." But about the novella, I do agree.

LRS: Your novels don't want to devour the world?

Fox: I'm utterly devoured by them when I'm at work on them—my time, my thought—I'm likely to write down a few words on a napkin I've been using, anything that's handy to write on, a matchbook cover, a damp sliver of paper....It's like a ferocious wakeful dream, all-encompassing.

LRS: At the end of The Western Coast, Annie is about to leave New York for Europe but wants to visit the same hostel she went to before she left the city five years before. She says that she is "one of those people who are always backtracking on themselves." Could she have been speaking of you, as well?

Fox: All writers backtrack, I think. If they're fortunate, the going back gives what they write about a certain depth.

LRS: As it ends, your memoir Borrowed Finery skips over what must be nearly forty years of your life to your reunion with your daughter Linda. How did you decide to close the book with that movement?

Fox: I don't know why I skipped all the years to my reunion with Linda. It seemed right at the time of its writing.

LRS: I was struck by the moment in your childhood where you were reading to neighborhood children and then looked up at some point to see that they had drifted off, and that you were alone, telling the story to yourself. It's tempting to read this episode symbolically for your life as an artist, but it's a symbol that might contain some ambiguity. I wonder how you read it....

Fox: Sometimes it feels like that—as if I looked up and saw that my listeners (readers) had drifted off. My life as a writer has been filled with such moments.

LRS: You will be 82 next week. Did you ever imagine that you would still be writing books (and for an eager audience) at this point in your life?

Fox: I didn't dream I'd be writing books when I was "not waving but drowning," at 16 or 17 when I got my first job. A lifetime isn't so long after all, and here I am still singing, in a raspier voice than when I began. My view of the future is now what it has always been, with some variation—the future is now.