Ironically, there’s something democratic in our common situation, the way in which we’re all feeling the same fear, the same uncertainty, the same panic, worry, anger, and anxiety. A solidarity, finally.
Narrative can preserve and remake the world as it falls apart. Such is the point of telling any story. Illness reminds us that the world isn’t ours; literature let’s us know that it is—sometimes.
I choose books with the resigned sense that I will never in my lifetime read all the authors recommended to me. It’s strange to have that feeling with TV.
Her analysis, she seems to feel, must be couched in womanly terms. I know I am a woman, but I can know things. Look at me knowing them, showing them to you.
When Shylock gives his celebrated soliloquy—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—the previous owner approvingly added in the margins “Bring your own BOOYEA!”
But reading a book a week made it harder to justify abandonment. I didn’t want to fall behind. The thought of that sent my Type A brain into a tailspin.
A “savvy woman,” the book purported, understood that there was “power in women’s bodies.” Was I a “savvy woman”? I shut the book, terrified that for some reason, I wasn’t.
Because being a musician—a decade of noes and passes—wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to have another go at failure in an attempt to start a writing career.
What a strange, terrible, beautiful thing this life is, that if we were to fully inhabit every single blessed second of it, we’d be as eternal as it were ever possible to be.
My daughter would need a chair to reach them, and I could see it was this fact—not my endorsement of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classics—that sold her on them.