I Always Say To My Students, If

Popular Success Is A Wonderful Gift If It Happens, But Like Money, It's Not The Motivation. The Effort To Create A Work Of Art That Is True And Potentially Lasting, That Is The Very Best Work Of Art You Can Create At That Point In Your Life - A Book That May Only Reach Or Move A Few People But Will Seem To People Somehow Transformative. That's The Ideal; That's Always The Motivation.

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.

The Professor Husband Of A Friend Of Mine Has Likened Children To The Insane. I Often Think Of It. He Says That Children Live On The Edge Of Madness, That Their Behavior, Apparently Unmotivated, Shares The Same Dream Logic As Crazy People's. I See What He Means, And Because I've Learned To Be Patient With Children, To Tease Out The Logic That's Always Somewhere There, And Irrefutable Once Explained.

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