Laura Mullen Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• What was toughest for me in writing "Trust," was reliving it, turning and facing this. We move on and we don't move on, you know? She's still there - and by "she" I mean me - caught in that windowless room, that bad bargain and that violation. No one can touch me, sexually, without activating that memory. But I had walled, I thought, that time off. I say that and then want to say "and I got off lightly"!

  Laura Mullen

  Memories, Moving, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I hope, by being honest about what happened to me, to help nourish a culture of honesty that might make something different - and better - possible. We really need to squarely face the issue of child abuse in America, and to look at our perversity, our illness.

  Laura Mullen

  Children, Honesty, America

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• There's a case in Baton Rouge, haunting me, where a mother left her twelve-year-old daughter to be babysat (every day for months) by a known pedophile and his four perverse friends, and the news broke of the bodies of two children, dead after long-term physical abuse, found in a storage locker in California. What hardest for me is, I suppose, what's hardest for my country

  Laura Mullen

  Daughter, Mother, Country

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Admitting how ill we are, how deep the damage goes, how constantly the abuse cycle is repeated and how horribly we have failed those who most deserve our care and protection.

  Laura Mullen

  Abuse, Admitting, Care

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.

  Laura Mullen

  Dallas, Groups, Events

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

  Laura Mullen

  Book, Desire, Batteries

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

  Laura Mullen

  Mother, Discovery, Matter

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.

  Laura Mullen

  Art, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is coherent, trust that was the best writing advice I ever got (I got it from Carole Maso and I pass it on). It's true, and clearer and clearer as one grows and gains an improved sense of who one actually is (as versus who one was supposed to be).

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Writing, Advice

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• We live in a culture that insists on "moving on" (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's "Miss Havisham" with some (self) recognition if not relief.

  Laura Mullen

  Loyalty, Moving, Self

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Miss Havisham is an important feminine literary figure in the tradition of Antigone (though it's significant that Antigone is fighting to bury something and Miss Havisham refuses, as it were, to bury the corpse). Like Hamlet, she's focused on what everyone would rather not know or would like to forget, and she seems crazy / stuck as well as bitter, but she's also a perfect prototype of a performance artist. She's intentionally hard to deal with inviting the audience to remain with the violated body, the evidence of violence.

  Laura Mullen

  Crazy, Fighting, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• It's painful, but it's part of the recognition that makes real healing possible, if healing is possible (the jury is out on that, that's the usual phrase - should I say the jury is deadlocked?). Staying with the pain, attending to it, being present to and with it - that's the task, because that's the only (as far as I can tell) hope of finding a way forward.

  Laura Mullen

  Pain, Real, Healing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?

  Laura Mullen

  Philosophy, Dwelling, Meditation

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Interesting, Missing

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

• I love that "furious and gorgeous barrage." That helps me see the relation between the introduction and the book's final section, where writing about a fire (and about the attempt to understand the event), also becomes an attempt to understand how writing might get closer to the fire, in so many ways.

  Laura Mullen

  Book, Writing, Fire

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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