Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or dis...
A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.
If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. Int...
But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress...
When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this...
I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold...
At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave A Message That's what my friend spokeinto his grim machine the winter he first went madas we both did in our thirties with stillno hope of revenue, gravely inkingour...
Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inne...
Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.
I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.
What would you write if you weren’t afraid?
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how t...
Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some in...