In 2004, Robert Birnbaum “interviewed”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_renata_adler.php Renata Adler at “The Morning News”:http://www.themorningnews.org/; unsurprisingly, the matchup of these two idiosyncratic people produced an interesting, wide-ranging, scattershot interview touching on many aspects of writing and reporting and publishing.
My colleague Benjamin Chambers has “twice”:http://emdashes.com/2008/07/speedboat-jen-fain-is-the-writ.php expressed “befuddlement”:http://emdashes.com/2007/03/other-things-im-excited-about.php at Adler’s inability to quote the last line of her own novel Speedboat accurately. The line Adler mangled, in her book _Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker,_ runs as follows: “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.”
With this in mind, here’s the sentence that jumped out at me: “I have this quirk, this neuroticism, [pause] this habit . . . of editing all the way down to the wire and past.”
So that’s it. She was just editing past the wire again!