know if she could. Or should. Shaking her just a little—she didn’t really want to look in my eyes—I said to her, firmly, to write, for fuck’s sake, to write, to fuck up and write about it and learn from it and never ever believe the bullshit that what she has experienced is not potentially all the valid stuff of literature. I don’t know if I got through to her. I wonder what would have happened if I had had those hands on my shoulder, shaking me the fuck up, at her age.
