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Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by
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Jen R.
is on page 230 of 244
To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.
— Mar 17, 2026 01:07PM
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Jen R.
is on page 216 of 244
The essay poured out with ease … of its own accord. When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that your job is to get out of its way.
— Mar 17, 2026 11:17AM
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Jen R.
is on page 203 of 244
I roamed and explored and made the most of the invitations that came my way. I was rich in time, and alive with excitement about the worlds and connections and ideas opening up to me. I miss the ability I had then to jump into my truck and go someplace for a week or two, to take the long way around, to linger and explore and not worry too much about obligations. I was free.
— Mar 17, 2026 02:42AM
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Jen R.
is on page 202 of 244
That transformation convinced me that culture could change politics, that representations could shape realities, that what we did as writers and historians mattered, that changing the story of the past could change the future. It was the genesis of a profound hope for me about the possibility of deep, unanticipated change and the capacity of those deemed marginal or insignificant to bring it about.
— Mar 17, 2026 02:11AM
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Jen R.
is on page 170 of 244
it's not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality.
— Mar 16, 2026 08:23AM
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Jen R.
is on page 122 of 244
Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.
— Mar 15, 2026 12:53AM
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Jen R.
is on page 120 of 244
That storage basement had other lessons to impart: it contained some art that would probably never be shown again- paintings and other items that had seemed significant in their time but been written out of history or never written into it, odd trends and faded heroes, movements that had lost their sheen, detours from the official road of art history, a windowless room of orphans and exiles.
— Mar 15, 2026 12:47AM
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Jen R.
is on page 108 of 244
Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.
— Mar 14, 2026 11:51AM
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Jen R.
is on page 101 of 244
Night is the space in which poetic intuition, not logic, prevails, in which you feel what you cannot see
— Mar 13, 2026 09:27AM
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Jen R.
is on page 58 of 244
How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion? All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin.
— Mar 10, 2026 04:23AM
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Jen R.
is on page 58 of 244
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak [but] it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don't remember how it happened. … it didn't occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.
— Mar 10, 2026 04:19AM
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Jen R.
is on page 58 of 244
There are absences so profound that even knowledge of their absence is absent; there are things missing even from our lists of the missing.
— Mar 10, 2026 04:14AM
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Jen R.
is on page 36 of 244
More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn't have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape…
— Mar 08, 2026 03:07PM
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