In college, they allow you to be entertained and let your mind wander, which is not good training to do anything difficult.” She worked for four years as a bricklayer in the Tidewater area of Virginia, a job, she told Kathryn Shultz in the New Yorker, that was “more valuable for my intellectual life than my entire college career. She’s worked as a secretary, a technical writer, a translator she’s waited tables and worked construction. She got married, and unmarried, and married again. She earned a doctorate in media studies at the University of Tübingen. After undergrad, she moved to Philadelphia where she lived in anarchist coops (not unlike the ones she describes in Nicotine) and where, from 1993-1997, she published Animal Review, a ‘zine that interviewed punk musicians about their pets. She finished high school at Stuart Hall School in Staunton, VA, then majored in philosophy at the College of William and Mary. Nell Zink was born in Corona, California in 1964 she and her two brothers were raised in rural King George County, Virginia. Zink is said to have replied: “Oh, I’ve already done that.” When he finally understood she was not, he actively encouraged her to try writing fiction. Her emails (which he would describe using words like feisty and presumptuous) were both remarkable and relentless Franzen assumed she was a writer he’d met already, and playing some sort of a joke.
Zink, like many of us, missed the “5 Under 35,” and the “20 Under 40,” mailed off her first manuscript in her late 40s to the novelist Jonathan Franzen, with whom, in a twist of fate that only real life can contrive, she’d begun exchanging emails about the songbirds of the Balkans.
You’re either on board, or you’ve missed the boat, with Zink.Įvery aspiring midlife novelist will likely be familiar already with the oft-recounted biography of Nell Zink, but her story seems to remain somehow blurred, evocative, just enough like every one of us to be any one of us but also distinctly, markedly unique. Zink’s writing is immersive, demanding the reader’s trust. In fact, she doesn’t seem to care what the reader believes, or doesn’t believe. But it’s really the stories surrounding these rather than any particular issue itself that seems to interest Zink, and she’s not writing to convince anyone of anything. In Nicotine, Zink returns to areas she’s taken on in her previous novels: identity and identity politics, class, race, and sex. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused. “That was something your dad used to say, about how it’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. It’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems, one character tells another in Nell Zink’s new novel, Nicotine.
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