It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.
In his 1964 talk on feminism, Winnicott says something he's been saying all along. ...We find that the trouble is not so much that everyone was inside and then born, but that at the very beginning eve...
I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.
How Horrid has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.
Every one' of the psychoanalytic trainees she [Alice Miller] has supervised has the same history:An insecure parent who did not appear to be insecure, but who depended on the child behaving in a parti...
It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.
Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?
My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon...
Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.
In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped inside the self, forever.But in another way, the self in the mirror was opening out, in an infinite unfurling.I am the one whose drive is b...
In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from...
If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.
I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.
The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.
I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy
Did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense… and becomes, for all practical purposes, real.
But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.
I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity
The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.
Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual...