I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.
I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that's the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr - excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual - or if formal books will emerge at all, if that's not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I'm excited by the possibility.
The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.
I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.
One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.
I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.
For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.
I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.
I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.
The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.
The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."
I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.
I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.
I am worthy of being read. I mean, one has to be convinced of one's genius.
Patriarchy is having the power to name.
The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.
I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.
The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.
How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.
On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.
If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.
I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.
I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.
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