Heroines

by Kate Zambreno

Part of the occupation of a woman writer, is still, perhaps, killing the angel in the house, fighting against repression, as Virginia Woolf wrote so long ago. A spiritual struggle against the good girls inside of us (two oppositional forces: we want to write, we want to be loved). Zelda too was forced to choose between her marriage, and being a writer.

We are writers because we say we are. We reassure each other of our potential genius. Because so much of being a writer is, I think, about identity.

Perhaps I don’t need to have a thicker skin. Perhaps it’s okay that I am porous, sensitive, excessive, emotional. But we do need to be brave. We do need to write despite it all.

We cannot wait around to be discovered. If you can’t write masterpieces why write? the doctors said to Zelda. Perhaps the goal is not to be the next Great American (Male) Novelist. This is perhaps closed to us anyway. The point, perhaps, is to write—by god to write—to write and refuse erasure while we’re living at least—and to use up all the channels possible through which to scream, to sing, to singe. All of these things.

A different sort of nerve is needed. To say fuck you to these internal and social prohibitions dictating what literature should be about. Fuck you to the objective correlative. Fuck the canon. Fuck the boys with their big books. For, after all, we must be our own heroines.