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We Live In A Culture That Wants To Put A Redemptive Face On Everything, So Anger Doesn't Sit Well With Any Of Us. But I Think Women's Anger Sits Less Well Than Anything Else. Women's Anger Is Very Scary To People, And To No One More Than Other Women Who Think: Oh, Goodness, Well, If I Let The Lid Off, Where Would We Be?

-Claire Messud

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We Live In A

Claire Messud

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We Live In A Culture That Wants To Put A Redemptive Face On Everything, So Anger Doesn't Sit Well With Any Of Us. But I Think Women's Anger Sits Less Well Than Anything Else. Women's Anger Is Very Scary To People, And To No One More Than Other Women Who Think: Oh, Goodness, Well, If I Let The Lid Off, Where Would We Be?

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And Then, Into The Fantasy, As Into A Dream, Would Come The Thought: It's Not Like This Anymore; The World Has Changed. Just The Way, Even At That Time Fully Two Years After My Mother's Death, I'd Catch Myself Thinking About Her As Alive; And Would Suddenly Remember, An Admonitory Finger Of Grief Upon My Breast, That She Was Gone.

There Questions Of Wanting To Be An Artist, And What Does That Mean, What Makes You An Artist? Are You An Artist If You're In A Gallery In New York And Not An Artist If You're Doing It At Home? Do You Need Legitimation To Count? If You've Been Acculturated To Believe That You Have Certain Obligations - Familial, Social, Human - If Multitasking Has Been Your Forte And That's What's Been Praised And Rewarded, Where Do You Find The Single-mindedness, The Selfishness To Do Something Like Art? I Think Those Are Questions That Arise Differently For Women And For Men.

As My Wise Friend Didi Has More Than Once Observed About Life's Passages, Every Departure Entails An Arrival Elsewhere, Every Arrival Implies A Departure From Afar.

That's So Her. You Know, Torn Between Big Ideas And A Party. She's Always Been That Way.

An Abiding Preoccupation For Me Is How Much Of Our Lives Are Invisible And Unknown By Other People Like The Chekhov Story The Lady With The Little Dog.

Popular Success Is A Wonderful Gift If It Happens, But Like Money, It's Not The Motivation. The Effort To Create A Work Of Art That Is True And Potentially Lasting, That Is The Very Best Work Of Art You Can Create At That Point In Your Life - A Book That May Only Reach Or Move A Few People But Will Seem To People Somehow Transformative. That's The Ideal; That's Always The Motivation.

If You’re Reading To Find Friends, You’re In Deep Trouble. We Read To Find Life, In All Its Possibilities. The Relevant Question Isn’t ‘is This A Potential Friend For Me?’ But ‘is This Character Alive?'

It's The Strangest Thing About Being Human: To Know So Much, To Communicate So Much, And Yet Always To Fall So Drastically Short Of Clarity, To Be, In The End, So Isolate And Inadequate. Even When People Try To Say Things, They Say Them Poorly Or Obliquely, Or They Outright Lie, Sometimes Because They're Lying To You, But As Often Because They're Lying To Themselves.

I Always Thought I'd Get Farther. I'd Like To Blame The World For What I've Failed To Do, But The Failure - The Failure That Sometimes Washes Over Me As Anger, Makes Me So Angry I Could Spit - Is All Mine, In The End. What Made My Obstacles Insurmountable, What Consigned Me To Mediocrity, Is Me, Just Me. I Thought For So Long, Forever, That I Was Strong Enough -- Or I Misunderstood What Strength Was.

Yes, Writing Is Essential To Me. It's My Way Of Living In The World.

I've Always Felt That If A Project Seems Easy, Or Even Attainable, Why Pursue It? I'll Always Find The Hardest Path.

Does Being Happy Simply Create More Time, In The Way That Being Sad, As We All Know, Slows Time And Thickens It, Like Cornstarch In A Sauce?).

We Read To Find Life, In All Its Possibilities.

It Doesn't Ever Occur To You, As You Fashion Your Mask So Carefully, That It Will Grow Into Your Skin And Graft Itself, Come To Seem Irremovable.

Nobody Would Know Me From My Own Description Of Myself; Which Is Why, When Called Upon (rarely, I Grant) To Provide An Account, I Tailor It, I Adapt, I Try To Provide An Outline That Can, In Some Way, Correlate To The Outline That People Understand Me To Have -- That, I Suppose, I Actually Have, At This Point. But Who I Am In My Head, Very Few People Really Get To See That. Almost None. It's The Most Precious Gift I Can Give, To Bring Her Out Of Hiding.

But Do You Know This Idea Of The Imaginary Homeland? Once You Set Out From Shore On Your Little Boat, Once You Embark, You'll Never Truly Be At Home Again. What You've Left Behind Exists Only In Your Memory, And Your Ideal Place Becomes Some Strange Imaginary Concoction Of All You've Left Behind At Every Stop.

We Live In A Culture That Wants To Put A Redemptive Face On Everything, So Anger Doesn't Sit Well With Any Of Us. But I Think Women's Anger Sits Less Well Than Anything Else. Women's Anger Is Very Scary To People, And To No One More Than Other Women Who Think: Oh, Goodness, Well, If I Let The Lid Off, Where Would We Be?

Life's Funny. You Have To Find A Way To Keep Going, To Keep Laughing, Even After You Realize That None Of Your Dreams Will Come True. When You Realize That, There's Still So Much Of A Life To Get Through.

The Apartment Was Entirely, Was Only, For Her: A Wall Of Books, Both Read And Unread, All Of Them Dear To Her Not Only In Themselves, Their Tender Spines, But In The Moments Or Periods They Evoked… Her Self, Then, Was Represented In Her Books; Her Times In Her Records; And The Rest Of The Room She Thought Of As A Pure, Blank Slate.

I've Discovered Over The Years That The Simplest Explanation Is Almost Always The Right One; And That Hunger Of One Kind Or Another - Desire, By Another Name - Is The Source Of Almost Every Sorrow.

I Was Funny -- Ha-ha, Not Peculiar. It Was A Modest Currency, Like Pennies: Pedestrian, Somewhat Laborious, But A Currency Nonetheless. I Was Funny, In Public, Most Often At My Own Expense.

Maybe That, Really, Is As Good A Definition As Any Of An Artist In The World: A Ruthless Person.

We Live In A Funny Time, A Funny Era, When Desire, To Be Adult Desire, Has To Be Conceived As Sexual. And That Didn't Used To Be The Case. Sexuality Is A Social Construction As Much As Anything Else And I Think The Realities Of Sexuality Don't Always Fit Into The Social Constructions That We Have, And We Live In A Goal-oriented Time - On All Fronts.

I Wanted To Write A Voice That For Me, As A Reader, Had Been Missing From The Chorus: The Voice Of An Angry Woman.

Above All, In My Anger, I Was Sad. Isn't That Always The Way, That At The Heart Of The Fire Is A Frozen Kernel Of Sorrow That The Fire Is Trying -- Valiantly, Fruitlessly -- To Eradicate.

There's A Reason Why Trainspotters Are Not Girls, There's A Reason Why There's The Myth Of The Slightly Autistic Male Genius, There's A Reason Why Gertrude Stein Believed That Her Self-presentation Was Male. One Could Argue That Was Susan Sontag Also. The Things That We Associate With Femaleness Are Not The Single-minded, Exclusive Pursuit Of A Vocation, Whether It Be Art Or Anything Else. It Is Not A Model That Is Widespread In Our Culture, It's Not Something We Think Of For Women.

But We're Lost In A World Of Appearances Now.

Anyway, These Books I Love, They’re All Books By Men—every Last One Of Them. Because If It’s Unseemly And Possibly Dangerous For A Man To Be Angry, It’s Totally Unacceptable For A Woman To Be Angry. I Wanted To Write A Voice That For Me, As A Reader, Had Been Missing From The Chorus: The Voice Of An Angry Woman.

If You’re Reading To Find Friends, You’re In Deep Trouble.

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