Personally, I Have Never Wished I Were

She Was The Reason I Was A Reader, And Being A Reader Was What Had Made Me Most Myself; It Had Given Me The Gifts Of Curiosity And Sympathy, An Awareness Of The World As An Odd And Vibrant Contradictory Place, And It Had Me Unafraid Of Its Oddness And Vibrancy And Contradictions.

To Remain Alone Did Not Seem To Me A Terrible Fate, No Worse Than Being Falsely Joined To Another Person.

I Had The Fleeting Thought Then That We Are Each Of Us Pathetic In One Way Or Another, And The Trick Is To Marry A Person Whose Patheticness You Can Tolerate.

If You Knew Where Your Happiness Came From, It Gave You Patience. You Realized That A Lot Of The Time, You Were Just Waiting Out A Situation, And That Took The Pressure Off; You No Longer Looked To Every Interaction To Actually Do Something For You.

I Think It's Significantly Easier To Be A Female Writer Today Than In The Early 1800's. That Said, It's Hard To Imagine Almost Anyone Who Knows Anything About Publishing Disagreeing With The Statement That Women Writers Today Are Often Taken Much Less Seriously Than Men Writers. But It's Hard To Quantify, And Even Define, What Being Taken Seriously Means.