I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.
Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief...
Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.
It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!
Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the colossal vitality of his illusion. Unlike G...
But, Jocelyn, if I really were all those things [good, kind, talented, hard working, open to change, and adorable]... ...I would die.'I wasn't sure what I meant by this, but it suddenly struck me as t...
Mom, how come you never go outside?""I told you, I'm a vampire.
Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.
Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.
At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, Mythology and Archetypal Experience, confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpret...
Your unconscious wants to express the pain you feel about your own lost innocence. But your ego wants to keep it repressed. To the compromise is anxiety.
Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.
I guess I felt like I'd failed her [by throwing up]. She had so many demands on her...The one thing she needed from me was that I not need anything from her [Bechdel's mother].
She has given me a way out.
If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Alice Miller writes that the child who suppresses his own feelings in order to accomodate a parent has been, in a sense, abandoned.'Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the...
On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.
It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.
I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.