The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.
The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.
I’ll watch a movie only if it meets the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two women in it. 2. Who talk to each other. 3. About something besides a man.
The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.
If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.
My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset – from salmon to canary to midnight blue – left him wordless.
I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.
I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.