What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

You’d be surprised how many of the girls and women I’ve been reading about came from similar backgrounds. Most of them were dirt-poor. A lot of them were shuttled back and forth between one parent or relative and another. They were always being uprooted as children. Several of them had been molested, too, by a relative or employer or somebody.”

“There are still psychoanalysts who talk about ‘hysterical personality,’ but most pyschiatrists don’t even consider hysteria a mental illness anymore.

They became what they were near.”