A few months later, Robinson and Obama met for a public conversation at the Iowa State Library, in Des Moines. Although she taught for more than thirty years, Robinson does not have much of an interrogative mode; she learns by reading and observation, in both cases through sustained acts of attention rather than overt inquisition. And so their planned conversation turned into the President interviewing the novelist; the questioner-in-chief listened as Robinson spoke about fear, faith, public education, and what she regards as the necessary features of a functioning democracy and a good life. In return, she almost willfully refused to ask him anything—trusting, as she always does, that if someone, even the President, has anything to say he will say it. In the words of an early New York Times review, this novel is “about people who have not managed to connect with a place, a purpose, a routine or another person. It’s about the immensely resourceful sadness of a certain kind of American, someone who has fallen out of history and is trying to invent a life without assistance of any kind, without even recognising that there are precedents. It is about a woman who is so far from everyone else that it would be presumptuous to put a name to her frame of mind”.

Max, D. T. (2012-09-07). "D.F.W. Week: The Wonderfully Arrogant First Pitch Letter". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X . Retrieved 2019-04-02. Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Eileen (Harris) and John J. Summers, a lumber company employee. [6] [7] [8] Her brother is the art historian David Summers, who dedicated his book Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting to her. She did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in 1966, and being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Brown, one of her teachers was the postmodern novelist John Hawkes. [9] She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from the University of Washington in 1977. [10] [11] Writing career [ edit ] When I interviewed Marilynne Robinson at the Cambridge literary festival in November 2014, and asked her about the genesis of Housekeeping, her account was typically low-key and matter-of-fact, without any of the ostentation you might expect from the author of such an immense literary achievement. She had written the novel, in longhand, for her own pleasure, she said, without much thought about its afterlife, found it taken up by friends, then represented by the New York literary agent Ellen Levine, who sold it without delay to the famous American literary publishing house Farrar Straus and Giroux (which published it in the States in 1980), and in the UK to Faber. Sylvie, as it turns out, is an avowed nonconformist with an unconventional lifestyle and unique view of the world. Her permissive parenting evolves into the enabling of an alternative existence for her nieces. This new freedom includes skipping school, stealing boats, riding the rails, and other risky, unstructured behavioral acts which are particularly outré when performed by young women in the conservative 1950s. In language as lyrical and lush as the landscapes it describes, Robinson tells a haunting story of the permanence of loss and the transitory nature of love. She reminds us that, despite the fragility of human relationships, our desires to hold onto them are what make us whole.National Book Award for Nonfiction shortlist for Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.” When Robinson was not quite twelve, she and her family were in an automobile accident. Another driver crossed the center line, totalling their car, injuring both of her parents, breaking her brother’s leg, and leaving her with a concussion. All four of them were hospitalized. The crash was so traumatic that Robinson does not drive, creating a rare dependency in someone who is otherwise almost entirely self-sufficient. Already in childhood she was comfortable with solitude, even with loneliness; her needs, including her need for other people, were remarkably limited. One of Robinson’s schoolteachers told her that “one must make one’s mind a good companion, because you live with it every minute of your life,” advice that she either took to heart or never required. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010) ISBN 9780300171471, OCLC 742007978Lily and Nona Foster – Sylvia Foster's sisters-in-law (i.e., Edmund's sisters), who moved from the Midwest to Spokane, to be closer to their brother. After Sylvia's death, they temporarily move from Spokane to Fingerbone to take care of Ruthie and Lucille. When this becomes too difficult, they summon Sylvie. All of the events take place in the house that was built by their grandfather, Edmund Foster. The man worked for the railroad and lived happily, but his life ended in a train derailment that took place on the bridge over the large glacial lake near Fingerbone. The orphans’ mother and aunts took different paths after they were raised in this house. Robinson was a pious child, but her parents, who were Presbyterians, did not go to church often. What services she did attend she mostly spent pushing the coins for her offering into the tips of her white gloves to give herself toad fingers. But she recalls feeling God’s presence everywhere: in the pooled creeks where tender new trees rose up from drowned logs; in the curious basalt columns that seemed like ancient temples; and in the lake, nearly fifty miles long and almost twelve hundred feet deep, cold and dark, like mystery itself. The Idaho of her childhood was a strikingly quiet place, its people reticent, its landscapes romantic; beauty was a given no matter which direction you looked.