Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Exotic: meaning you’re “desired.” For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
And that’s the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a “good” mother in the world’s eyes or a “bad” mother, how everything in a woman’s life is funneled through her body between her legs.
Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
She wasn’t in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there’s a place to be located on a map that’s destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn’t too late. If no one stops you.
I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It’s so wonderful, going to bed.
Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
My writing is often a way of ‘bearing witness’ for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won’t be affected too much by my personal life.
My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.
If you’re living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It’s in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been ‘put on hold.’
I’ve always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel ‘Black Water,’ I provide a voice for someone who has died and can’t speak for herself.
I wrote a novel called ‘Blonde,’ which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth – that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.
I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It’s like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don’t find it easy.
My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so ‘The Gravedigger’s Daughter’ is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.
Often in gothic novels there’s a large house, an estate, and it’s symbolic of that culture. Usually it’s sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it’s a whole community.
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.