“I have never experienced writers block and I ve written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story for a time, and then return to the page. Even the muse needs a vacation to rest up before she gives more of herself.”
“My story begins with a question.”
“I thought of my sweet little girl and her chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and long brown hair with bangs that constantly needed trimming. She was all that really mattered in this world, and I could not keep moping over some guy who came in and out of my life faster than a season of American Idol.”
“Dogs possess a quality that s rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn t care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I d led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I d let her up onto the bed with me. She d writhe with joy at that. She d wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I d just lie there, and I d feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I d hear myself laugh out loud.”
“There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.”
“I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.”
“Everything I write is a rebound.”
“How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It s the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well. But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time s passage without the fear that you ve just fritted away your time on earth without being relevant? You ll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don t have any? What kind of person does that make me? Virginia Woolf wrote, Across the broad continent of a woman s life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.”
“I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one...”
“We mask our needs as the needs of others.”
“I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.”
“A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.”
“Their promise, my children s possibilities, still linger in our home.”
“What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it. What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?”
“The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.”
“The children we bring into the world are small replicas of ourselves and our husbands; the pride and joy of grandfathers and grandmothers. We dream of being mothers, and for most of us that dreams are realised naturally. For this is the Miracle of Life.”
“You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.”