Two years? That's entirely too long. If you want, we can take care of that. After two years it's pure therapy.
I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries. "
I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.
She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.
I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.
I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.
Not only was [Edwin Land] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.
Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Almost everything we do is automatic, yet we're not aware of that. We feel like there's a circle of light. We're like the drunk who lost his keys and is looking under the streetlight, and the cop says, "Where'd you lose your keys?" You say, "Back in the alley, but the light's so much better over here. " The divided self refers to the fact that we are basically animals with animal brains. These animal brains run our lives. They're very good at it.