“INTERVIEWER

So many of your books, fiction and nonfiction, are explorations of the lives of very poor people. What makes it possible for you to cross the boundaries of social class so gracefully?

PONIATOWSKA

I think of the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington. She was my great friend and I wrote a novel about her, called Leonora (2011). She was born into an upper-class English family and was even presented to the queen, though she took along Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza to pass the time waiting in the line of debutantes. Typically, young women of her class were expected to marry someone rich and titled, but she rebelled almost from childhood, was expelled from two schools, and finally found her way to a good art school.” #ElenaPoniatowska

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7147/the-art-of-fiction-no-238-elena-poniatowska