Out of Language Comes Nothing and Everything: Lynne Tillman’s Thrilled to Death for LARB

Getting to write about Lynne Tillman is a thrill. (So too her collected stories Thrilled to Death). I have been reading her since my early twenties as I write here in LARB:

Picture me: 21, 22, in a railroad apartment on the Lower East Side, the radio’s refrain like water, like waves, like air itself as I am trying to write, trying to be. I also needed the radio’s hum to hold me, to keep me from the isolation of my thoughts. The AM station’s tinny intonations repeated: “You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world.” The sheer hubris of claiming to contain the world between ad breaks: a cockiness from another era. Yet the way Tillman captures fear and news as intertwined—as terrifying and electrifying, a pulse underlying everything—feels contemporary. “Bad News,” with its inner monologue extending to baroque imaginings, reads like an essay on being a woman in an era of 24-hour media.