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If You Talk To Geneticists They Are Constantly Finding That Your Genes Are Being Switched On And Off Because Of The Environment. Genes Alone Do Not Determine An Exact Path In Your Life.

-Jeffrey Eugenides

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If You Talk To

Jeffrey Eugenides

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If You Talk To Geneticists They Are Constantly Finding That Your Genes Are Being Switched On And Off Because Of The Environment. Genes Alone Do Not Determine An Exact Path In Your Life.

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The Zipper Opened All The Way Down Our Spines.

Her Eyes Watered And She Was A Foot Taller Than Any Of Her Sisters, Mostly Because Of The Length Of Her Neck Which Would One Day Hang From The End Of A Rope

Reading A Novel After Reading Semiotic Theory Was Like Jogging Empty-handed After Jogging With Hand Weights. What Exquisite Guilt She Felt, Wickedly Enjoying Narrative! Madeleine Felt Safe With A Nineteenth Century Novel. There Were Going To Be People In It. Something Was Going To Happen To Them In A Place Resembling The World. Then Too There Were Lots Of Weddings In Wharton And Austen. There Were All Kinds Of Irresistible Gloomy Men.

There Have Been Hermaphrodites Around Forever, Cal. Forever. Plato Said That The Original Human Being Was A Hermaphrodite. Did You Know That? The Original Person Was Two Halves, One Male, One Female. Then These Got Separated. That's Why Everybody's Always Searching For Their Other Half. Except For Us. We've Got Both Halves Already.

I Was Beginning To Understand Something About Normality. Normality Wasn't Normal. It Couldn't Be. If Normality Were Normal, Everybody Could Leave It Alone. They Could Sit Back And Let Normality Manifest Itself. But People-and Especially Doctors- Had Doubts About Normality. They Weren't Sure Normality Was Up The Job. And So They Felt Inclined To Give It A Boost.

The Television Replaced The Sound Of Conversation That Was Missing From My Grandparents' Lives.

They're Just Memories Now. Time To Write Them Off.

Novelists Are Always Resisting Autobiographical Readings Of Their Work, Because They Know How False Those Can Be.

Every Novelist Should Possess A Hermaphroditic Imagination.

If You Think Of Even Tolstoy Or A Book Like 'anna Karenina,' You Go From Character To Character, And Each Section Is From The Third Person Perspective Of A Different Character, So You Get To See The Whole World A Little More Kaleidoscopically That Way. That's Traditional Narrative Manner, And I Haven't Done A Book Like That Before, But I Enjoyed It.

Well, Marriage Doesn't Function In The Way It Used To In Terms Of Deciding Our Fate, But It's In Our Heads, And It Determines A Lot Of Our Actions. Like, Right Now, If You Think About Gay Marriage - And They Just Started Having The First Gay Marriages In New York - It Shows What A Potent Idea Marriage Remains For People.

Pregnancy Humbles Husbands. After An Initial Rush Of Male Pride They Quickly Recognise The Minor Role That Nature Had Assigned Them In The Drama Of Reproduction.

The Following Doodle: A Girl With Pigtails Is Bent Under The Weight Of A Gigantic Boulder. Her Cheeks Puff Out, And Her Rounded Lips Expel Steam. One Widening Steam Cloud Contains The Word Pressure, Darkly Retraced.

Dr. Armonson Stitched Up Her Wrist Wounds. Withen 5 Minutes Of The Transfusion He Declared Her Out Of Danger. Chucking Her Under The Chin, He Said, "what Are You Doing Here, Honey? Your Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." And It Was Then Cecelia Gave Orally What Was To Be Her Only Form Of Suicide Note, And A Useless One At That, Because She Was Going To Live: "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A 13 Year Old Girl.

He Remained Heartbroken, Which Meant One Of Two Things: Either His Love Was Pure And True And Earthshakingly Significant; Or He Was Addicted To Feeling Forlorn, He Liked Being Heartbroken.

I Think There's A Real Connection Between Acting And Writing Novels Because The Way I Write Characters Has A Little Bit To Do With The Method Acting That I Was Taught In High School And College.

But I Care About The Reader, And I'm Trying To Keep The Reader's Attention For As Long As I Can.

It's Amazing What You Can Get Used To.

Emotions, In My Experience Aren't Covered By Single Words. I Don't Believe In "sadness," "joy," Or "regret." I'd Like To Have At My Disposal Complicated Hybrid Emotions, Germanic Traincar Constructions Like, Say, "the Happiness That Attends Disaster." Or: "the Disappointment Of Sleeping With One's Fantasy." ... I'd Like To Have A Word For "the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants" As Well As For "the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar." I've Never Had The Right Words To Describe My Life.

Though At This Moment She Felt Abused, Abandoned, And Ashamed Of Herself, Madeleine Knew That She Was Still Young, That She Had Her Whole Life Ahead Of Her--a Life In Which, If She Persevered, She Might Do Something Special--and That Part Of Persevering Meant Getting Past Moments Just Like This One, When People Made You Feel Small, Unlovable, And Took Away Your Confidence.

I Was Aware That You Weren't Supposed To Write About Suburbia, That It Was Undignified In Some Way, The Subject Matter Not Momentous Enough. And So, For A Long Time, That Kept Me From Writing About It. But Once I Began, I Realized It Was Just As Interesting As Anywhere Else.

She Wanted Out Of The Decorating Scheme.

They Thought Depression Was Like Bieng 'depressed'. They Thought It Was Like Being In A Bad Mood, Only Worse. Therefore, They Tried To Get Him To Snap Out Of It.

I'm Not Really An Autobiographical Writer, Though I Use Lots Of Stuff From My Life To Make My Stories Seem Real. But When I Actually Write About Myself, I Get Very Confused.

I Went Into The Desert To Forget About You. But The Sand Was The Color Of Your Hair. The Desert Sku Was The Color Of Your Eyes. There Was Nowhere I Could Go That Wouldn't Be You.

Jerome Was Sliding And Climbing On Top Of Me And It Felt Like It Had The Night Before, Like A Crushing Weight. So Do Boys And Men Announce Their Intentions. They Cover You Like A Sarcophagus Lid. And Call It Love.

The Essential Matrimonial Facts: That To Be Happy You Have To Find Variety In Repetition; That To Go Forward You Have To Come Back To Where You Begin.

We Greeks Are A Moody People. Suicide Makes Sense To Us. Putting Up Christmas Lights After Your Own Daughter Does It--that Makes No Sense. What My Yia Yia Could Never Understand About America Was Why Everyone Pretended To Be Happy All The Time.” -mrs. Karafilis

One Of The Reasons That Art Is Important To Me Is Sometimes It Actually Feels More Coherent Than Life. It Orders The Chaos.

Paris Was A Museum Displaying Exactly Itself.

But What Humans Forget, Cells Remember. The Body, That Elephant

The Perishable Nature Of Love Is What Gives Love Its Profound Importance In Our Lives. If It Were Endless, If It Were On Tap, Love Wouldn't Hit Us The Way It Does.

She Understood That Her Heart Operated On Its Own Instructions, That She Had No Control Over It Or, Indeed, Anything Else.

It's Often Said That A Traumatic Experience Early In Life Marks A Person Forever, Pulls Her Out Of Line, Saying, "stay There. Don't Move.

Being A Writer Is A Solitary Life. So The Little Part Of Me That's An Actor Still Enjoys The Theatrical Part Of Reading And Doing The Voices And Telling The Story.

My Goal In Life Is To Become An Adjective.

But In The End It Wasn't Up To Me. The Bigs Things Never Are. Birth, I Mean, And Death. And Love. And What Love Bequeaths To Us Before We're Born.

What If You Had Faith And Performed Good Works, What If You Died And Went To Heaven, And What If All The People You Met There Were People You Didn't Like?

He Had The Feeling That There Was Something Physically Behind His Eyes, Blocking The Light.

In The Midst Of My Skeptical, Cynical, Often Pessimistic Nature Exists A Slender Capacity To Believe, If Only Temporarily, In A Guiding, Unseen Power, And Whenever This Happens, I Go With It. That's What Inspiration Is. You Don't Get It From The Gods. You Make It.

I Live My Own Life And Nurse My Own Wounds. It's Not The Best Way To Live. But It's The Way I Am.

All Sixteen Mentioned Her Jutting Ribs, The Insubstantiality Of Her Thighs, And One, Who Went Up To The Roof With Lux During A Warm Winter Rain, Told Us How The Basins Of Her Collarbones Collected Water.

Depression Is Like A Bruise That Never Goes Away. A Bruise In Your Mind. You Just Got To Be Careful Not To Touch It Where It Hurts. It's Always There, Though.

They Made Us Participate In Their Own Madness, Because We Couldn't Help But Retrace Their Steps, Rethink Their Thoughts, And See That None Of Them Led To Us.

We Listened To Them, But It Was Clear They'd Received Too Much Therapy To Know The Truth.

You Went Out With A Girl At First Because The Sheer Sight Of Her Made You Weak In The Knees. You Fell In Love And Were Desperate Not To Let Her Get Away. And Yet The More You Thought About Her, The Less You Knew Who She Was. The Hope Was That Love Transcended All Differences. That Was The Hope.

Words, Words, Word. Once, I Had The Gift. I Could Make Love Out Of Words As A Potter Makes Cups Of Clay. Love That Overthrows Empire. Love That Binds Two Hearts Together, Come Hellfire & Brimstone. For Sixpence A Line, I Could Cause A Riot In A Nunnery. But Now -- I Have Lost My Gift. It's As If My Quill Is Broken, As If The Organ Of My Imagination Has Dried Up, As If The Proud -illegible Word- Of My Genius Has Collapsed.

Regret, Already Sogging Me Down, Burst Its Dam. It Seeped Into My Legs, It Pooled In My Heart.

She Lost Much Of Her Appetite. At Night, An Invisible Hand Kept Shaking Her Awake Every Few Hours. Grief Was Physiological, A Disturbance Of The Blood. Sometimes A Whole Minute Would Pass In Nameless Dread - The Bedside Clock Ticking, The Blue Moonlight Coating The Window Like Glue - Before She`d Remember The Brutal Fact That Had Caused It.

I'm Constantly Having Doubts And Moments Of Depression And Then Excitement And Then Back Into The Slough Of Despond.

To Be Inclusive You Must Accommodate Different Levels Of Sophistication.

Chunks Of His Life Fell Away, So That While We Were Moving Ahead In Time, He Was Moving Back.

What Lingered After Them Was Not Life, Which Always Overcomes Natural Death, But The Most Trivial List Of Mundane Facts: A Clock Ticking On A Wall, A Room Dim At Noon, And The Outrageousness Of A Human Being Thinking Only Of Herself.

We Realized That The Version Of The World They Rendered For Us Was Not The Version Of The World They Really Believed In.

Virgin Suicides

I Think It Is Important To Remind People Of The Extent Of Our Free Will.

In The End We Had The Pieces Of The Puzzle, But No Matter How We Put Them Together, Gaps Remained, Oddly Shaped Emptinesses Mapped By What Surrounded Them, Like Countries We Couldn't Name.

She Had Given Birth To Me And Nursed Me And Brought Me Up. She Had Known Me Before I Knew Myself And Now She Had No Say In The Matter. Life Started Out One Thing And Then Suddenly Turned A Corner And Became Something Else.

In The End, It Wasn't Death That Surprised Her But The Stubbornness Of Life.

I Wanted To Be An Actor. My Parents Were Not Too Keen On That.

At Night The Cries Of Cats Making Love Or Fighting, Their Caterwauling In The Dark, Told Us That The World Was Pure Emotion, Flung Back And Forth Among Its Creatures, The Agony Of The One-eyed Siamese No Different From That Of The Lisbon Girls, And Even The Trees Plunged In Feeling.

When You Stood Between Somebody You Loved And Death, It Was Hard To Be Awake And It Was Hard To Sleep.

If Mitchell Was Ever Going To Become A Good Christian, He Would Have To Stop Disliking People So Intensely.

It Didn't Matter In The End How Old They Had Been, Or That They Were Girls, But Only That We Had Loved Them, And That They Hadn't Heard Us Calling, Still Do Not Hear Us, Up Here In The Tree House With Our Thinning Hair And Soft Bellies, Calling Them Out Of Those Rooms Where They Went To Be Alone For All Time, Alone In Suicide, Which Is Deeper Than Death, And Where We Will Never Find The Pieces To Put Them Back Together.

Yes, You Need A Passport To Prove To The World That You Exist. The People At Passport Control, They Cannot Look At You And See You Are A Person. No! They Have To Look At A Little Photograph Of You. Then They Believe You Exist.

The Worst Thing About Religion Was Religious People.

Historical Fact: People Stopped Being People In 1913. That Was The Year Henry Ford Put His Cars On Rollers And Made His Workers Adopt The Speed Of The Assembly Line. At First, Workers Rebelled. They Quit In Droves, Unable To Accustom Their Bodies To The New Pace Of The Age. Since Then, However, The Adaptation Has Been Passed Down: We've All Inherited It To Some Degree, So That We Plug Right Into Joy-sticks And Remotes, To Repetitive Motions Of A Hundred Kinds.

You Begin Always Knowing Nothing. You Remain Forever An Amateur, A First Timer.

Knowing Nothing

You Never Get Over It, But You Get To Where It Doesn't Bother You So Much.

Every Letter Was A Love Letter.

My House Fly Theory Is Related To My Theory About Why Time Seems To Go Faster As You Get Older." "why's That?" The Girl Asked. "it's Proportional," Leonard Explained. "when You're Five, You've Only Been Alive A Couple Thousand Days. But By The Time You're Fifty, You've Lived Around Twenty Thousand Days. So A Day When You're Five Seems Longer Because It's A Greater Percentage Of The Whole.

Virgin Suicide What Was That She Cried? No Use In Stayin' On This Holocaust Ride She Gave Me Her Cherry She's My Virgin Suicide

On Their Best Days, Writers All Over The World Are Winning Pulitzers, All Alone In Their Studios, With No One Watching.

The Lover`s Discourse Was Of An Extreme Solitude. The Solitude Was Extreme Because It Wasn`t Physical. It Was Extreme Because You Felt It While In The Company Of The Person You Loved. It Was Extreme Because It Was In Your Head, The Most Solitary Of Places.

I Was Thinking How Amazing It Was That The World Contained So Many Lives. Out In These Streets People Were Embroiled In A Thousand Different Matters, Money Problems, Love Problems, School Problems. People Were Falling In Love, Getting Married, Going To Drug Rehab, Learning How To Ice-skate, Getting Bifocals, Studying For Exams, Trying On Clothes, Getting Their Hair-cut And Getting Born. And In Some Houses People Were Getting Old And Sick And Were Dying, Leaving Others To Grieve. It Was Happening All The Time, Unnoticed, And It Was The Thing That Really Mattered.

Falling In Love

Heartbreak Is Funny To Everyone But The Heartbroken.

It Was Possible To Feel Superior To Other People And Feel Like A Misfit At The Same Time.

It Was Something Every Child Knew How To Do, Maintain A Direct And Full Connection With The World. Somehow You Forgot About It As You Grew Up, And Had To Learn It Again.

Basically What We Have Here Is A Dreamer. Somebody Out Of Touch With Reality. When She Jumped, She Probably Thought She'd Fly

-who Are You, Anyway? -just Someone Who Knows, From Personal Experience, How Attractive It Can Be To Think You Can Save Somebody Else By Loving Them.

I'm Hopefully Making The Reader Feel A Lot About The Characters And Then About Their Own Life.

We Knew, Finally, That The Girls Were Really Women In Disguise, That They Understood Love And Even Death, And That Our Job Was Merely To Create The Noise That Seemed To Fascinate Them.

Some Pulitzer Winners - Novelists - Have Confided To Me That Getting The Prize Screwed Them Up. It Messed With Their Heads. That Hasn't Been My Experience.

No Reason To Mention My Peculiarities, My Wandering In The Maze These Many Years, Shut Away From Sight. And From Love, Too.

She Held Herself Very Straight, Like Audrey Hepburn, Whom All Women Idolize And Men Never Think About.

Virgin Suicides

The Window Gave Onto A View Of Dove-gray Roofs And Balconies, Each One Containing The Same Cracked Flowerpot And Sleeping Feline. It Was As If The Entire City Of Paris Had Agreed To Abide By A Single Understated Taste. Each Neighbor Was Doing His Or Her Own To Keep Up Standards, Which Was Difficult Because The French Ideal Wasn't Clearly Delineated Like The Neatness And Greenness Of American Lawns, But More Of A Picturesque Disrepair. It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

Whenever We Got A Glimpse, Their Faces Looked Indecently Revealed, As Though We Were Used To Seeing Women In Veils.

I Spend Most Of Every Day Writing. I Like To Write Every Day If I Can. I Don't Start Extremely Early.

The More She Thought About It, The More Madeleine Understood That Extreme Solitude Didn't Just Describe The Way She Was Feeling About Leonard. It Explained How She'd Always Felt When She Was In Love. It Explained What Love Was Like And, Just Maybe, What Was Wrong With It.

Capitalism Has Resulted In Material Well-being But Spiritual Bankruptcy.

Virgin Suicides

So Do Boys And Men Announce Their Intentions. They Cover You Like A Sarcophagus Lid. And Call It Love.

We're All Made Up Of Many Parts, Other Halves. Not Just Me.

It Was As If, Before She`d Met Him, Her Blood Had Circulated Grayly Around Her Body, And Now Ir Was All Oxygenated And Red. She Was Petrified Of Becoming The Half-alive Person She`d Been Before.

I Think The Suicides In My First Book Came From The Idea Of Growing Up In Detroit. If You Grow Up In A City Like That You Feel Everything Is Perishing, Evanescent And Going Away Very Quickly.

I Was Unemployable When I Got Out Of College.

Lux Spent The Ride Dialing The Radio For Her Favorite Song. "it Makes Me Crazy," She Said. "you Know They're Playing It Somewhere, But You Have To Find It.

She May Have Looked Normal On The Outside, But Once You'd Seen Her Handwriting You Knew She Was Deliciously Complicated Inside.

When I'm Creating A Character, It's A Little Bit Like What My Theater Teachers Used To Tell Me About Stanislavsky, Like If You're Using Sense Memory To Do A Scene - If You Have To Cry In A Scene, You Try To Remember Something In Your Life That Made You Cry And You Use That In Order To Get The Tears.

He Knew A Lot About His Grandparents - And Perhaps He Feels He's Been Endowed With Abilities To Go Into People's Heads Who Are Long Dead - But, To A Certain Extent, He's Making It Up.

I Hadn't Gotten Old Enough Yet To Realize That Living Sends A Person Not Into The Future But Back Into The Past, To Childhood And Before Birth, Finally, To Commune With The Dead. You Get Older, You Puff On The Stairs, You Enter The Body Of Your Father. From There It's Only A Quick Jump To Your Grandparents, And Then Before You Know It You're Time Traveling. In This Life We Grow Backwards.

Scars Crossed Her Welded Wrists.

I'd Like To Have A Word For 'the Sadness Inspired By Failing Restaurants' As Well As For 'the Excitement Of Getting A Room With A Minibar.

But, Like Anyone In Love, Madeleine Believed That Her Own Relationship Was Different From Every Other Relationship, Immune From Typical Problems.

College Wasn't Like The Real World. In The Real World People Dropped Names Based On Their Renown. In College, People Dropped Names Based On Their Obscurity.

Mitchell Had Answered That, As Far As He Understood Them, Mystical Experiences Were Significant Only To The Extent That They Changed A Person's Conception Of Reality, And If That Changed Conception Led To A Change In Behavior And Action, A Loss Of Ego.

Mystical Experiences

There Was Nowhere I Could Go That Wouldn't Be You.

Jacques Derrida Is A Very Important Thinker And Philosopher Who Has Made Serious Contributions To Both Philosophy And Literary Criticism. Roland Barthes Is The One I Feel Most Affinity For, And Michel Foucault, Well, His Writing Influenced My Novel, 'middlesex.'

Remember That Day You Said You Loved Me? Remember That? See, You Could Do That Because You're Basically A Sane Person, Who Grew Up In A Loving, Sane Family. You Could Take A Risk Like That. But In My Family We Didn't Go Around Saying We Loved Each Other. We Went Around Screaming At Each Other. So What Do I Do, When You Say You Love Me? I Go And Undermine It.

Biology Gives You A Brain. Life Turns It Into A Mind.

We Knew The Pain Of Winter Rushing Up Your Skirt, And The Ache Of Keeping Your Knees Together In Class, And How Drab And Infuriating It Was To Jump Rope While The Boys Played Baseball. We Could Never Understand Why The Girls Cared So Much About Being Mature, Or Why They Felt Compelled To Compliment Each Other.

She Was A Large, Disordered Woman, Like A Child's Drawing That Didn't Stay Within The Lines.

There's A Kind Of Acting That Goes On In My Head When I'm Writing A Character Where I Put Myself In Their Place.

Normality Wasn't Normal. It Couldn't Be. If Normality Were Normal, Everybody Could Leave It Alone. They Could Sit Back And Let Normality Manifest Itself.

I'm The Final Clause In A Periodic Sentence, And That Sentence Begins A Long Time Ago, In Another Language, And You To Read It From The Beginning To Get To The End, Which Is My Arrival.

You Used To Be Able To Tell A Person's Nationality By The Face. Immigration Ended That. Next You Discerned Nationality Via The Footwear. Globalization Ended That.

If I Write A Character, Instead Of Looking From The Outside, Like Maybe A Journalist Would, Trying To Describe Them Physically And Figuring Out What Kind Of Things They Might Be Interested In Or Have In Their House, I Don't Really Do It That Way. I Try To Feel What It Would Be Like To Be Inside This Person, To Be Them.

Where Else Would She Feel More Comfortable Than In This Subterranean Realm Where People Wrote Down What They Couldn't Say, Where They Gave Voice To Their Most Shameful Longings And Knowledge?

Their Desire Was Silent Yet Magnificent, Like A Thousand Daisies Attuning Their Faces Toward The Path Of The Sun.

I've Never Had The Right Words To Describe My Life, And Now That I've Entered My Story, I Need Them More Than Ever.

When I Wrote The Virgin Suicides, I Gave Myself Very Strict Rules About The Narrative Voice: The Boys Would Only Be Able To Report What They Had Seen Or Found Or What Had Been Told To Them.

Narrative Voice

She'd Become An English Major For The Purest And Dullest Of Reasons: Because She Loved To Read.

There Are Some Books That Reached Through The Noise Of Life To Grab You By The Collar And Speak Only Of The Truest Things.

Everyone Struggles Against Despair, But It Always Wins In The End. It Has To. It's The Thing That Lets Us Say Goodbye.

Three Times A Day Petrovich Showed Up At The Nurse's Office For His Injections, Always Using The Hypodermic Needle Himself Like The Most Craven Of Junkies, Though After Shooting Up He Would Play The Concert Piano In The Auditorium With Astounding Artistry, As Though Insulin Were The Elixir Of Genius.

The Ideas For My Books Come About In Two Ways. There Can Be An Intellectual Idea That Seems To Be The Reason For Writing The Book. [...] The Other Motive Is Unconscious. There Is Something Deeply Psychological And Emotional That Draws Me To The Material In The First Place.

Dieting Fooled You Into Thinking You Could Control Your Life.

The World, A Tired Performer, Offers Us Another Half-assed Season.

What I Do When I Create A Character Is Put In Details From All The People I Know Who Might Be Like That Person, And Then Put In A Huge Amount Of Myself.

I Had A Briefcase At One Point, But It Was A Kind Of 1980s New Wave Briefcase. It Was Made Of Some Kind Of Cardboard And It Had Metal Hinges. It Was Kind Of Faux Industrial Looking, And I Used To Carry My Books In It Rather Than A Backpack. I Didn't Want To Have Normal Student Accoutrements.

People Don't Save Other People. People Save Themselves.

On The Morning The Last Lisbon Daughter Took Her Turn At Suicide- It Was Mary This Time, And Sleeping Pills, Like Therese- The Two Paramedics Arrived At The House Knowing Exactly Where The Knife Drawer Was, And The Gas Oven, And The Beam In The Basement From Which It Was Possible To Tie A Rope.

That Since Cecilia’s Suicide, The Lisbon’s Could Hardly Wait For The Night To Forget Themselves In Sleep

In Madeleine's Face Was A Stupidity Mitchell Had Never Seen Before. It Was The Stupidity Of All Normal People. It Was The Stupidity Of The Fortunate And The Beautiful, Of Everybody Who Got What They Wanted In Life And So Remained Unremarkable.

But That Was In The Days When They Expected Perils To Come From Without, And Nothing Made Less Sense By That Time Than A Survival Room Buried In A House Itself Becoming One Big Coffin.

Depending On The Year Or The Therapist He Was Seeing, He'd Learned To Ascribe Just About Every Facet Of His Character As A Psychological Reaction To His Parents' Fighting: His Laziness, His Overachieving, His Tendency To Isolate, His Tendency To Seduce, His Hypochondria, His Sense Of Invulnerability, His Self-loathing, His Narcissism.

I Studied English Literature In The Honors Program, Which Means That You Had To Take Courses In Various Centuries. You Had To Start With Old English, Middle English, And Work Your Way Toward The Modern. I Figured If I Did That It Would Force Me To Read Some Of The Things I Might Not Read On My Own.

Bubble Gum Angels Swooped From Top Margins Or Scraped Their Wings Between Teeming Paragraphs, Maidens With Golden Hair Dripped Sea Blue Tears Into The Books Spine, Grape-colored Whales Spouted Blood Around A Newspaper Item (pasted In) Listing Arrivals To The Endangered Spieces List. Six Hatchlings Cried From Shattered Shells Near An Entry Made On Easter. Cecilia Had Filled The Pages With A Profusion Of Colors And Curlicues, Candyland Ladders And Striped Shamrocks.

To Start With, Look At All The Books.

All Of A Sudden America Wasn't About Hamburgers And Hot Rods Anymore. It Was About The Mayflower And Plymouth Rock. It Was About Something That Had Happened For Two Minutes Four Hundred Years Ago, Instead Of Everything That Had Happened Since. Instead Of Everything That Was Happening Now!

This Can't Be True But I Remember It.

I Think, Especially When You're In College, Each Book That You're Reading Tends To Tell You Who You Are.

Planning Is For The World's Great Cities, For Paris, London, And Rome, For Cities Dedicated, At Some Level, To Culture. Detroit, On The Other Hand, Was An American City And Therefore Dedicated To Money, And So Design Had Given Way To Expediency.

The Girls Took Into Their Own Hands Decisions Better Left To God. They Became Too Powerful To Live Among Us, Too Self-concerned, Too Visionary, Too Blind.

For The Eternity That Lux Lisbon Looked At Him, Trip Fontaine Looked Back, And The Love He Felt At That Moment, Truer Than All Subsequent Loves Because It Never Had To Survive Real Life, Still Plagued Him, Even Now In The Desert, With His Looks And Health Wasted. 'you Never Know What'll Set The Memory Off,' He Told Us. 'a Baby's Face. A Bell On A Cat's Collar. Anything.' They Didn't Exchange A Single Word. But In The Weeks That Followed, Trip Spent His Days Wandering The Halls, Hoping For Lux To Appear, The Most Naked Person With Clothes On He Had Ever Seen.

I Always Work In A Room Where There's No Internet To Keep From Being Distracted So Easily.

In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

Girls Forbidden To Dance Would Only Attract Husbands With Bad Complexions And Sunken Chests.

It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

Emotions, In My Experience, Aren't Covered By Single Words. I Don't Believe In "sadness", "joy", Or "regret". Maybe The Best Proof That The Language Is Patriarchal Is That Is Oversimplifies Feeling. I'd Like To Have At My Disposal Complicated Hybrid Emotions.

I Was Born Twice: First, As A Baby Girl, On A Remarkably Smogless Detroit Day In January Of 1960; And Then Again, As A Teenage Boy, In An Emergency Room Near Petoskey, Michigan, In August Of 1974.

Winter Is The Season Of Alcoholism And Despair.

It Was Morning By The Clock But Deepest Nighttime In His Body.

The Mind Self-edits. The Mind Airbrushes. It's A Different Thing To Be Inside A Body Than Outside. From Outside, You Can Look, Inspect, Compare. From Inside There Is No Comparison.

What Are You Doing Here, Honey? You're Not Even Old Enough To Know How Bad Life Gets." (...) "obviously, Doctor," She Said, "you've Never Been A Thirteen-year-old Girl.

Maybe The Best Proof That The Language Is Patriarchal Is That It Oversimplifies Feeling.

My Change From Girl To Boy Was Far Less Dramatic Than The Distance Anybody Travels From Infancy To Adulthood.

She Could Become A Spinster, Like Emily Dickinson, Writing Poems Full Of Dashes And Brilliance, And Never Gaining Weight.

I Remember Liking To Write Stories Pretty Early On. In Fourth Or Fifth Grade, They Would Give Us The Beginning Of A Story, And We Were Supposed To Finish It. I Remember Liking That. But I Didn't Think About Deciding To Become A Writer Until High School At About The Age Of 16.

I Have A Very Beautiful Room In My House... It's Glass On Three Sides, And You'd Think That's The Perfect Place To Write. Somehow In That Nice Room I Feel Too Exposed, And... I'm Too Distracted By Things Going On, So I End Up Writing In A Not-very-nice Office Bedroom.

Every Letter Was A Love Letter. Of Course, As Love Letters Went, This One Could Have Been Better. It Was Not Very Promising, For Instance, That Madeleine Claimed Not To Want To See Him For The Next Half-century.

That Was The Deal Basically: Catatonia Without; Frenzy Within

And In Some Of The Houses, People Were Getting Old And Sick And Were Dying, Leaving Others To Grieve. It Was Happening All The Time, Unnoticed, And It Was The Thing That Really Mattered. What Really Mattered In Life, What Gave It Weight, Was Death.

I Saw The Movie, He Said. I Know What It's About. Listen To This. When Girls Get To Be About Twelve Or So - He Leaned Toward Us - Their Tits Bleed.

Now All The Mute Objects Of My Life Seem To Tell My Story, To Stretch Back In Time, If I Look Closely Enough.

The Statue Of Liberty's Gender Changed Nothing. It Was The Same Here As Anywhere: Men And Their Wars.

I'd Like To Show How 'intimations Of Mortality Brought On By Aging Family Members' Connects With 'the Hatred Of Mirrors That Begins In Middle Age.

That Was When Leonard Realized Something Crucial About Depression. The Smarter You Were, The Worse It Was. The Sharper Your Brain, The More It Cut You Up.

I Want An Ending That’s Satisfying. I’m More Of A Classical Writer Than A Modernist One In That I Want The Ending To Be Coherent And Feel Like An Ending. I Don’t Like When It Just Seems To Putter Out. I Mean, Life Is Chaotic Enough.

Sourmelina's Secret (as Aunt Zo Put It): 'lina Was One Of Those Women They Named The Island After.

That’s How People Live, By Telling Stories. What’s The First Thing A Kid Says When He Learns How To Talk? “tell Me A Story.” That’s How We Understand Who We Are, Where We Come From. Stories Are Everything.

Added To Their Loveliness Was A New Mysterious Suffering, Perfectly Silent, Visible In The Blue Puffiness Beneath Their Eyes Or The Way They Would Sometimes Stop In Mid-stride, Look Down, And Shake Their Heads As Though Disagreeing With Life.

They Were Bound For College, Husbands, Child-rearing, Unhappiness Only Dimly Perceived- Bound, In Other Words, For Life.

The Pulitzer Prize Is An Idea; It's A Vote Of Confidence. Like Literature, It Exists Purely In The Mind.

But Maybe The Charm Bracelets Understood More About Life Than I Did. From An Early Age They Knew What Little Value The World Placed In Books, And So Didn't Waste Their Time With Them. Whereas I, Even Now, Persist In Believing That These Black Marks On White Paper Bear The Greatest Significance, That If I Keep Writing, I Might Be Able To Catch The Rainbow Of Consciousness In A Jar.

The Only Way We Know It's True Is That We Both Dreamed It. That's What Reality Is. It's A Dream Everyone Has Together.

The Humming Of My Parents' Voices From Behind My Bedroom Wall, Which Throughout My Childhood Had Filled Me With A Sense Of Security, Had Now Become A Source Of Anxiety And Panic.

My Family Suffered. My Hair Turned Up In Every Corner, Every Drawer, Every Meal. Even In The Rice Puddings Tessie Made, Covering Each Little Bowl With Wax Paper Before Putting It Away In The Fridge--even Into These Prophylactically Secure Desserts My Hair Found Its Way! Jet Black Hairs Wound Themselves Around Bars Of Soap. They Lay Pressed Like Flower Stems Between The Pages Of Books. They Turned Up In Eyeglass Cases, Birthday Cards, Once--i Swear--inside An Egg Tessie Had Just Cracked. The Next-door Neighbor's Cat Coughed Up A Hairball One Day And The Hair Was Not The Cat's.

It Was One Of Those Humid Days When The Atmosphere Gets Confused. Sitting On The Porch, You Could Feel It: The Air Wishing It Was Water.

Lux’s Frequent Forged Excuses From Phys. Ed. She Always Used The Same Method, Faking The Rigid T’s And B’s Of Her Mother’s Signature And Then, To Distinguish Her Own Handwriting, Penning Her Signature, Lux Lisbon, Below, The Two Beseeching L’s Reaching Out For Each Other Over The Ditch Of The U And Barbed-wire X.

Children Learn To Speak Male Or Female The Way They Learn To Speak English Or French.

We Value Love Not Because It's Stronger Than Death But Because It's Weaker. Say What You Want About Love: Death Will Finish It. You Will Not Go On Loving In The Grave, Not In Any Physical Way That Will At All Resemble Love As We Know It On Earth. The Perishable Nature Of Love Is What Gives Love Its Importance In Our Lives. If It Were Endless, If It Were On Tap, Love Wouldn't Hit Us The Way It Does.

We're All Well-acquainted With Depression, We All Know What The Low Moods Are, But The Mania Was Not Something I Knew Much About. I Didn't Know That It Would Make Someone Dress Extravagantly Or Start To Pun, And To Stay Up And Drink.

It Was The Combination Of Many Factors... With Most People, Suicide Is Like Russian Roulette. Only One Chamber Has A Bullet. With The Lisbon Girls, The Gun Was Loaded. A Bullet For Family Abuse. A Bullet For Genetic Predisposition. A Bullet For Historical Malaise. A Bullet For Inevitable Momentum. The Other Two Bullets Are Impossible To Name, But That Doesn't Mean The Chambers Were Empty.

I Tell My Students That When You Write, You Should Pretend You’re Writing The Best Letter You Ever Wrote To The Smartest Friend You Have. That Way, You’ll Never Dumb Things Down. You Won’t Have To Explain Things That Don’t Need Explaining. You’ll Assume An Intimacy And A Natural Shorthand, Which Is Good Because Readers Are Smart And Don’t Wish To Be Condescended To.

There Is A Small Window Of Opportunity For Freckled Girls To Tan.

The Window Was Still Open.” Mr Lisbon Said. “i Don’t Think We’d Ever Remembered To Shut It. It Was All Clear To Me. I Knew I Had To Close It Or Else She’d Go On Jumping Out Of It Forever

We Knew That Cecilia Had Killed Herself Because She Was A Misfit, Because The Beyond Called To Her, And We Knew That Her Sisters, Once Abandoned, Felt Her Calling From That Place, Too.

Virgin Suicides

You Can Tell When Something's Not Moving Forward Anymore. When The Doubts You Have About It Don't Go Away.

Detroit's A Great Music Town. If Your Interaction With It Was Mainly Musical, I'm Sure You Have A Good Opinion Of The Place.

Basically You Come Up With The Fictional Idea And You Start Writing That Story, But Then In Order To Write It And To Make It Seem Real, You Sometimes Put Your Own Memories In. Even If It's A Character That's Very Different From You.

The Daily Act Of Writing Remains As Demanding And Maddening As It Was Before, And The Pleasure You Get From Writing - Rare But Profound - Remains At The True Heart Of The Enterprise. On Their Best Days, Writers All Over The World Are Winning Pulitzers, All Alone In Their Studios, With No One Watching.

The Trees Like Lungs Filling With Air. My Sister, The Mean One, Pulling My Hair.

If You Talk To Geneticists They Are Constantly Finding That Your Genes Are Being Switched On And Off Because Of The Environment. Genes Alone Do Not Determine An Exact Path In Your Life.

Can You See Me? All Of Me? Probably Not. No One Ever Really Has.

They Had Killed Themselves Over Our Dying Forests, Over Manatees Maimed By Propellers As They Surfaced To Drink From Garden Hoses; They Had Killed Themselves At The Sight Of Used Tires Stacked Higher Than The Pyramids; They Had Killed Themselves Over The Failure To Find A Love None Of Us Could Ever Be. In The End, The Tortures Tearing The Lisbon Girls Pointed To A Simple Reasoned Refusal To Accept The World As It Was Handed Down To Them, So Full Of Flaws.

She Thought A Writer Should Work Harder Writing A Book Than She Did Reading It.

I Don’t Know What You’re Feeling, I Won’t Even Pretend

Virgin Suicides

Is There Anything As Incredible As The Love Story Of Your Own Parents? Anything As Hard To Grasp As The Fact That Those Two Over-the-hill Players, Permanently On The Disabled List, Were Once In The Starting Lineup? It's Impossible To Imagine My Father, Who In My Experience Was Aroused Mainly By The Lowering Of Interest Rates, Suffering The Acute, Adolescent Passions Of The Flesh.

You Don't Understand Me. I'm A Teenager. I've Got Problems!

Virgin Suicides

That's The Way I Will Write Characters, Put A Fair Amount Of Myself In Them, And Then Everyone Else Who Was Like That Person, I Will Pick And Choose.

I Know That Attaching Memories To Books May Be Going Out Of The World, But While It Lasts, It's A Strong Record Of Your Life.

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