June 22, 2021
I transform any unexpected tragedy, with worry, into the expected. I sap its narrative potential.
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February 15, 2021
When we write about people of our own creation, when we write fiction, there’s different work to do. We aren’t just noticing and deciding how to tell what we’ve noticed or experienced...We’re painting in those faint images and sensations ourselves, layering them onto more concrete descriptions of place and reality.
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April 30, 2020
In those months, months of northern winter when my husband took the car to work and I existed alone with a baby in the American suburbs, the sheer brutality of our way of life rained down on me and showed me that I had not, before, understood.
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November 21, 2019
It is difficult for me, and I imagine for many of my generation, to step outside and engage with the natural world in any way without worry. Is this the end? Will we lose it, all of it?
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November 05, 2019
When I was growing up, the beautiful people with interesting lives were American or European, like me. Always. This reality remained unexamined for me, as did its implied negative—that it’s a little less desirable to be anything else.
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June 20, 2019
It had always seemed so simple and self-explanatory to me that “man” had two different meanings, depending on context. It could either mean “man” or “person,” and I didn’t see why I had to change the way I spoke and wrote because higher-up academics had decided this was no longer correct.
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April 11, 2019
This vial is exactly the same sort of container that is used when people give out bubbles as wedding favors. Except there’s no bubble wand inside. Obviously there’s no reason for one, because it would be sacrilegious to make bubbles with holy oil.
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July 31, 2018
I find I write a lot of stuff like this. Moments of humiliation, large and small. Attacks against which we are incapable of defending ourselves, for whatever reason. And here’s why: once they’re written down, they’re different. I’ve gotten addicted to the alchemy of writing, where those moments of pain and humiliation become beautiful and useful.
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December 19, 2017
For the next several months I watched my own silence as though I had no power over it. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, though it might have been relevant to our conversations about getting married. I didn’t tell my mother back home, or anyone I worked with. I cut my foot fetching water, bled on the front steps, and said nothing to my sisters as they helped me clean it up.
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September 12, 2017
I’m pretty sure there are some of us whose lives don’t work that way ─ people for whom failure seems less a painful moment on a journey and more the destination itself, or sometimes, for me, like the place I’ve been living all my life, wandering in loose circles with my eyes squeezed shut so I can imagine I’m somewhere, anywhere else.
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