Tennessee Williams: Trying to Find the Door

Interview with Tennessee Williams

Conducted by James Grissom

New Orleans

1982

Every thing I've written is autobiographical. The situations were creative, fabricated to house the very real predicaments in which I continually find myself. My writing, like my life, is the persistent act of trying to find the door through which I can escape myself and the unique plots I craft around myself. If I wrote a play about a disoriented astronaut on the moon, it would really be a means by which I was trying to discover if I could live while sober. If I wrote a story about a lost boy trying to find his mother, it could be me grieving for my own mother, or trying desperately to find the next word, the next sentence, the next day in my life.

© 2016 James Grissom