It Doesn't Ever Occur To You, As

I Think There's No Question That There's A Reason Why Small Children Make Great Art And Why Slightly Bigger Children Don't. And It's Because Small Children Don't Worry About What Anybody Else Thinks And Slightly Bigger Children Start To Worry About These Things.

Nobody Would Know Me From My Own Description Of Myself; Which Is Why, When Called Upon (rarely, I Grant) To Provide An Account, I Tailor It, I Adapt, I Try To Provide An Outline That Can, In Some Way, Correlate To The Outline That People Understand Me To Have -- That, I Suppose, I Actually Have, At This Point. But Who I Am In My Head, Very Few People Really Get To See That. Almost None. It's The Most Precious Gift I Can Give, To Bring Her Out Of Hiding.

The Apartment Was Entirely, Was Only, For Her: A Wall Of Books, Both Read And Unread, All Of Them Dear To Her Not Only In Themselves, Their Tender Spines, But In The Moments Or Periods They Evoked… Her Self, Then, Was Represented In Her Books; Her Times In Her Records; And The Rest Of The Room She Thought Of As A Pure, Blank Slate.

There's A Reason Why Trainspotters Are Not Girls, There's A Reason Why There's The Myth Of The Slightly Autistic Male Genius, There's A Reason Why Gertrude Stein Believed That Her Self-presentation Was Male. One Could Argue That Was Susan Sontag Also. The Things That We Associate With Femaleness Are Not The Single-minded, Exclusive Pursuit Of A Vocation, Whether It Be Art Or Anything Else. It Is Not A Model That Is Widespread In Our Culture, It's Not Something We Think Of For Women.

I Wanted To Write A Voice That For Me, As A Reader, Had Been Missing From The Chorus: The Voice Of An Angry Woman.