What We Write About When We Write About the Past | CrimeReads

I think about this quote a lot, and it resonates with me on several levels. On a personal level, it reminds me that life is a kind of revolving door: Our past traumas, triumphs, joys, and heartbreak shape and re-shape who we are in a perpetual cycle. Of course, on a social level, Faulkner's quote reminds us that our society cannot escape its past any more than an individual can. Wars are fought and then fought again. Actions taken today result in events that will occur twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, on and on into a causal chain of action and reaction.

But this quote resonates with me as a writer, as well, especially as one whose first novel is set more than seventy years in the past. Then again, is it? If the past isn't even past, can a novel published in 2020 but set in 1941 actually be about the past?