Most writers have experienced some kind of trauma. Why else would we feel propelled to do this excruciating work if not partly to make sense of some of our wounds?
My mother and father were my first environmental teachers, and watching them hold their heads up high while they experienced racism and still maintained their sense of wonder absolutely informs how I shaped this book.
I don’t really know what the lesson here is. It’s not exactly this uplifting story of perseverance, but it does seem like I had to surrender all hope before something good could happen.
I’m not saying memoirists should never use marriage as a final plot point. But if we can choose something else, if we resist that expectation, we can ask the culture to consider other ways women come to resolution.
I think Cheever really did a fantastic job of summing up what is dark and odd and messed up about the suburbs, and I think the suburbs do a fantastic job of summing up what is wrong with America in many ways.
Toxic relationships are hurtful, and exist on a continuum of uncaring and manipulative behavior, ranging from microaggressions to violence. It haunts us because it hurts us.
I could feel myself becoming restless and wanting my narrator to grow with me, make wiser choices, but instead I had to stay in her world, refine it and dig deeper into the questions I was exploring.
One of my frustrations with the rhetoric of self-care, especially as it’s tied up with contemporary mysticism, is it can feel so rarefied and classist. But self-love and self-acceptance should not be solely available to people of a certain tax bracket.
The interesting thing is that you start out writing about an object, whatever it is, and you wind up thinking about people or place, relationships or personal history.
I think many of us are looking to bust out of the current conventions of novel structure, which somehow feel so fixed. Which is interesting to me because the novel is actually a pretty unregulated form.
One of my most central beliefs about literature is that literature is a way of looking. It doesn’t have to do with extraordinary or unusual events. It has to do with a particular attitude taken toward the world.