Alex Andriesse at the Paris Review:
A few years after I first read The Thin Place, I found myself interviewing Davis for an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, which I was editing at the time. We talked then, as we still talk now, about writing and animals and the city of Philadelphia, where part of my family is from, and where Davis was born on November 13, 1946. Her childhood in a semidetached house on Woodale Road, at the edge of the affluent suburb of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, has found its way into many of her books. It’s there most directly in the haunted house in Hell (1998), the suburban street in Duplex, and the shared childhood memories of the mysterious “we” who narrate The Silk Road (2019). But once you have entered the labyrinth of Davis’s work, you begin to see it, or sense it, around every corner: an atmosphere of dread ruled by the rituals of parents and the patterns of convention—a place where the important things go unsaid or are spoken in code so that if the children overhear, they won’t understand. A place that anybody in their right mind would try to escape.
As a child, Davis escaped into fairy tales (especially those of Hans Christian Andersen), Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Later, she went away to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied alongside her girlhood friend Peggy Reavey and Reavey’s future husband David Lynch.
more here.
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