I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.
But I’ve married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people – they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you’re older.
Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you’re actively miserable.
Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.
In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.
Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you’d find on a gramophone record.
It’s not easy to make friends when you’re an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.
Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren’t sure if we even liked one another anymore.
And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.
Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.
The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
If theres a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.
A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.
The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.