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256 pages, Hardcover
First published March 10, 2020
"I became silently furious, back in the day when I had no clear feminist ideas, just swirling inchoate feelings of indignation and insubordination. A great urge to disrupt the event [reviewer's note: the opening for an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg photographs, with two sad, mentally ill women as the only female subjects in the entire show] overtook me; I wanted to shout and to shout that I was not disrupting it because a woman is no one, and to shout that since I did not exist my shouting did not exist either and could not be objectionable. I was, in that room, that time, clear and angry about my nonexistence that was otherwise mostly just brooding anxiety somewhere below the surface."
"Out on your own, you're a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange; you're learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination. You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back and choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally."
"I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it's not terrifying."
"When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from the task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting."
“To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.”
In those days I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other.
The fight wasn't just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice. More than survive, then: to live.
So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement.
The young writer I met there didn't know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate...She was speaking in various voices because she didn't yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet made one.
'women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence.'
“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”
about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others'. It's a way of disappearing from where you are...a world arises in your head that you have built at the author's behest, and when you're present in that world you're absent from you own...It's the reader who brings the book to life.
Research is often portrayed as dreary and diligent, but for those with a taste for this detective work there's the thrill of the chase - of hunting data, flushing obscure things out of hiding, of finding fragments that assemble into a picture.
Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together - or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions...recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble.