Unconscious bias doesn’t just affect reception; it shapes female ambition and determination, in visceral, hard-to-pinpoint ways. Studies have shown, for instance, that in the face of subtle discouragement (facial expressions and so forth) candidates perform less well. It’s really, really hard to write a book. It takes a lot of time and solitude. In my experience, women are not as good at insisting they need that time and solitude. (I wonder how many female writers have, like me, sometimes wished they were a man so everyone—family, friends, partners—would understand a little better when they go in the room and shut the door for weeks on end.) If the world around you reliably reflects a slight skepticism about, a slight resistance to your talent, it’s easy to begin to internalize that notion and to strive for less, or just be turned off by the whole racket. I often wonder if this, in turn, means that women end up writing less ambitious books. I’d sorely like to put that question to bed, but I can’t help asking it over and over.
Category Archives: Quotes
Moorings
[I]t would be terrifying if we, as adults, changed as much as children during those early years. We’d all be awash with anxiety and engulfed by a grief so large it couldn’t be contained because there would no stability and cohesiveness in our lives at all. We would have no moorings, nothing to keep us tethered to this earth.
We count on a high degree of sameness not only in ourselves, but also in the people we care about. … It’s not just the capacity to change, but also the capacity to resist change, that stabilizes our sense of identity, our continuity with the past, and our connections with others.
Empathy [and] Complicity
Reading narrative requires empathy. The character’s perspective becomes your own, and through this relationship you begin to feel as another person would. …
But stories also require complicity: the reader participates in the action of the story simply by imagining and interpreting it.
That Narrative
It’s a grey ethical area for writers. Memoirists are vampires and thieves, you might say: vampires and thieves with shards of ice in their hearts. However much [Candia] McWilliam may want us to think about her story in terms of the sentences, of course we are also interested in the sense. In a prurient (or perhaps hope-filled) desire to read about how a famous novelist hit the bottle and rock bottom and then somehow got her life together again. Yes, of course that’s a deliberately clichéd version of her story and an unfair reflection of McWilliam’s rich writing. But it would be naïve to suggest the book won’t be read for that narrative.
Tragic Desperation
Reading someone’s handwriting can be incredibly intimate and revealing, perhaps especially in an age of e-mail and texting. The confines of font streamline and depersonalize emotionality, in contrast with the romance of thoughtful script or the tragic desperation of slanted scrawls.
Landscape
Book-lined rooms were part of our shared domestic landscape. To walk into a house with books was an unspoken promise of conversation that would jump beyond the events of the day. Brightly colored book jackets, waving for attention, were also good companions, a linear museum of handsome typography and graphic design through the decades.
Inherently Solitary
I plan to use [an ereader] to read, alone, in public, and not to attract the kind of weirdo who, upon seeing me with it, thinks it’s okay to come over and ask to touch it, and how much I like it. I would never want that, and in fact, if I thought that was going to happen, I’d stick to print for public reading, even if it does my shoulder in. If this desire to read alone, to engage in something so inherently solitary in the presence of other humans is objectively uncool, and society is one big high school cafeteria…I guess I’m cool with that.
Reading
By making books commodities, the modern market has stripped them of much of their romantic charm. I like the smell of a moldy book as much as the next bibliophile, but not as much as I once did. And while I’ve yet to purchase a Kindle or iPad, which make buying books in a store or online seem like hard work, I keep some titles on my netbook and iPod and can see myself making a fuller transition to e-books. And as I do, I’ll become even less romantic about books—just as I became progressively less romantic about music as my collection has shifted from vinyl to CDs to mp3s. Holding an LP cover or even a CD jacket used to anchor the listener to something corporeal. But not anymore. The same is happening to books. The ancient ceremony of reading by turning its pages being disrupted by the e-book’s clicks and swipes. In the process it distances us from the old magic conjured by books. Books are being replaced by reading.
TV will break your heart
Once you’re committed [to a TV show], however, there is trouble on the horizon. There are two possible outcomes. The series keeps up its quality and maintains your loyalty and offers you years of enjoyment. Then it is canceled. This is outrageous. You have lost some friends. Alternatively, the series declines in quality, and this makes you unhappy. You may drift away. Either way, your devotion has been spit upon.
It’s true that there is a third possibility. You might die before the series ends. How comforting is that?
With film you’re in and you’re out and you go on with your life. TV is like a long relationship that ends abruptly or wistfully. One way or another, TV will break your heart.
Giggling with desolation
It’s all there in [Frank Kermode’s] early years, of course, or a lot of it—the mother with no parents, no family, no past, but with a rich sense of language, both Manx and English, along with a practiced, lively social style that was deferential to strangers yet easy with them, to whom Frank owed, as he put it, not only his “early training in politeness and motiveless civility” but also the “association of gaiety with terror, giggling with desolation.”
—Elisabeth Sifton
quoting Frank Kermode
The Remainder Table 