I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Four years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.
It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they’re not.
Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves.
Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such ‘tantalizing’ cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother’s are evident.
It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.
For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as “the library” might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.
Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.
The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.
I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.
I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it; two, two women talking to each other, and three, talking about something besides a man.
Life many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.
What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his parent’s inventive bent? What might have wrought?
The only thing to transcend is the idea that there’s something to transcend. Nirvana is samsara. I finally got the memo.
The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.
I didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home – someone they’ve never spoken to but know by sight – I recognized her with a surge of joy.
There are two ways to surpass your parents. Ones is to achieve the thing they had hoped for. One is somewhat easier: just to live longer.
Or maybe he had gotten too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of... I have made use of this technique myself, however, this attempts to access emotions vicariously... eager to detect in my listener that flinch of grief that eluded me.
My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage. There was no story, for example, of how they met.
Perhaps I’m being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.