Growing up was like falling into a hole.
Essential political decisions are made not once, but again and again in a variety of situations, always against that pressure to compromise, to bargain.
Simple answers, reductionist politics, are the most prone to compromise, to saying we’re addressing the essential issue and all that other stuff can slide. It is, in reality, people who slide.
If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community, we will have to go through the grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one.
It was death Aunt Ruth was thinking about all the time. Death was the reason she had talked so much, so intently, death was the fire burning her up. With every breath and laugh and wiped-away tear, she had been dying.
Take them as letters from a battleground more mythic than remembered, and use them to figure out who you are and what you might become.
The books still weren’t real, but maybe they were written about city women, television women, Yankee women – just about as strange as Zeus had always been and Jesus was getting to be.
The things you hesitate to talk about,” Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, “those are the things you should be writing about.
My stories are not against anyone; they are for the life we need.
Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.
I found in myself the heroine of every heartbreak song I had ever laughed at but played again.
It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know – which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.
I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.
I believed in the worth of biography and even of ethnography, but I believed more powerfully in the reach of a well-told narrative that set out to pull the reader into the life of that child I had not been. I did not want to relate what had happened to me.
Asking “what if” and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person’s perspective – it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.
I had to say to her that it isn’t just men, and it isn’t just men “like that.” I had to talk to her about the women I had found after I left home, women who breathed out hatred as steadily as the worst man we had ever known. I had to say that the world is a bigger, meaner, more complicated place than anyone ever told us, and the tools for dealing with it are real, but we have to invent them for ourselves, make them up as we go along.
Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies.
If it’s true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it.
What I loved were books that heightened the sense of life’s wonders without denying the complexity and horror that sometimes accompanied those wonders.
I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be.