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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.

-Jeffrey Eugenides

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Reading A Novel After

Jeffrey Eugenides

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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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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

Knowing Nothing

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.

This Can't Be True But I Remember It.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Every Novelist Should Possess A Hermaphroditic Imagination.

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.

To Be Inclusive You Must Accommodate Different Levels Of Sophistication.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Virgin Suicides

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

It's Amazing What You Can Get Used To.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That Was The Deal Basically: Catatonia Without; Frenzy Within

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

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.

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.

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

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

Virgin Suicides

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

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'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.

I Have A Good Memory For Early Life. My Visual Memory Is Good About Childhood And Adolescence, And Less Good In The Last 10 Years. I Could Probably Tell You Less What Happened In The Last 10 Years. I Remember What Houses Looked Like, Sometimes They Just Pop Into My Head.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

She Wanted Out Of The Decorating Scheme.

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.

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

Dieting Fooled You Into Thinking You Could Control Your Life.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There Comes A Moment, When You Get Lost In The Woods, When The Woods Begin To Feel Like Home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

Virgin Suicides

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

Scars Crossed Her Welded Wrists.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Virgin Suicides

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.

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.

Every Letter Was A Love Letter.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Winter Is The Season Of Alcoholism And Despair.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

And She Had Succeeded, On The Second Try, In Hurling Herself Out Of The World

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

It Was Amazing How It Worked: The Tiniest Bit Of Truth Made Credible The Greatest Lies.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Heartbreak Is Funny To Everyone But The Heartbroken.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Worst Thing About Religion Was Religious People.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

-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.

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.

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.

It Took Courage To Let Things Fall Apart So Beautifully.

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.

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!

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.

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 Unemployable When I Got Out Of College.

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

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

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.

To Start With, Look At All The Books.

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.

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

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.

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

I Approach Writing Female Characters The Same Why I Approach Writing Male Characters. I Never Think I'm Writing About Women, I Think I'm Writing About One Woman, One Person. And I Try To Imagine What She Is Like, And Endow Her With A Lot Of My Own Thoughts And History.

Some Cities Have Fallen Into Ruin And Some Are Built Upon Ruins But Others Contain Their Own Ruins While Still Growing.

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

The Zipper Opened All The Way Down Our Spines.

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

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

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.

Paris Was A Museum Displaying Exactly Itself.

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

My Goal In Life Is To Become An Adjective.

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

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.

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