Minus a community, I invented one. “I entered into alliances with my paper soulmates,” writes Hélène Cixous in her essay “Coming to Writing.” These women served as an invisible community—like in Susan Sontag’s play Alice in Bed, about the brilliant letter writer and diarist Alice James (sister-of-Great-Men, Henry and William), except I’m the neurasthenic, and they are all hovering over me. Or like in Judy Chicago’s 80s installation The Dinner Party, where she lays out place settings for famous heroines both real and fictional.
