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The room was furnished haphazardly—frankly a bit shabbily—and filled with books and paintings. It was the kind of room that would be recognizable the world over as the living quarters of a culture worker, or at least a culture lover. It was a room that suggested—all those books—that human problems could be solved by the application of careful thought and considered ethics. It was a humanist room.
When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and strangely exciting.
To call someone a monster is to reduce them to just one aspect of the self.
It meant: someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms. A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography.
The very phrase “cancel culture” presupposes the privileging of biography—a whole idea of culture built on the fact that we know everything about everyone.
We live in a biographical moment, and if you look hard enough at anyone, you can probably find at least a little stain. Everyone who has a biography—that is, everyone alive—is either canceled or about to be canceled. The stain—spreading, creeping, wine-dark, inevitable—is biography’s aftermath. The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained. It’s what we, the audience, are left to contend with.
Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.
The genius isn’t so much a kind of person as a status of person: a person who can do whatever he wants.
The genius’s demons can err on the side of insanity. We want our genius to have a dark side. Great art can only be made with the help of the demons—and the demons can push you to insanity. Of course, when license goes too far, it can devolve into lunacy. The question is, I suppose, whether lunacy makes a great artist, or whether all that freedom makes a person crazy.
Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.
Only two classes of people are asked to be purely good: mothers and children.
Who has enough money to live on? Who can afford the time it takes to write?
as a reader, a pregnancy makes my heart sink. Pregnancy is the end of narrative. All the doors shut at once. Don’t cut yourself off from options!
If motherhood is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, in large part that’s because of—not despite—its optional nature. I got to choose.
Rage is the emotion of the powerless,” said my therapist to me sometime in the mid-1990s.
Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view.
It’s a new experience of empathy for me—the empathy of saying what is worst about me, what is most monstrous, and having it accepted not because I am special, but because I’m not.
When that happens to you, when you receive that very specific kind of empathy: You learn to give it to others as well. Not as a kind of painstaking reciprocity, or out of fairness, or because you are good, but because hearing that you are ordinary in your badness, and extending that understanding of ordinariness to others—doing that helps you continue to not-drink. And therefore continue to live.
Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works. A series of decisions is made—decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics—and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave.
The scale of what needs to happen in order for climate change and environmental degradation to be slowed is so massive that no single entity can handle it. The emphasis devolves to the individual’s responsibility: to recycle, to reuse water bottles, to forgo plastic straws. Because we are atomized individuals with no collective power, we are left with a grandiose yet ultimately meaningless sense of the importance of our purchases, our gestures, our decisions.
The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
My books kept me from loneliness, all my life.
