Emma Donoghue Quote

Do you realize what a beacon you’ve become? A—I beg your pardon? A beacon of hope, says the woman, smiling. As soon as we announced we’d be doing this interview, our viewers started calling in, e-mails, text messages, telling us you’re an angel, a talisman of goodness . . . Ma makes a face. All I did was I survived, and I did a pretty good job of raising Jack. A good enough job. You’re very modest. No, what I am is irritated, actually. The puffy-hair woman blinks twice. All this reverential—I’m not a saint. Ma’s voice is getting loud again. I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I’ve been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn’t believe. Other cases like yours? Yeah, but not just—I mean, of course when I woke up in that shed, I thought nobody’d ever had it as bad as me. But the thing is, slavery’s not a new invention. And solitary confinement—did you know, in America we’ve got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? Some of them for more than twenty years. Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. As for kids—there’s places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets till they go blind—