American - Author | February 26, 1986 -
A woman's body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother's, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself.
Alexandra Kleeman
MotherMyselfWomanParentsBody
I think I may be the most well-adjusted person you'd ever meet who thinks constantly about falling out of her life. And my life is pretty great! It's not like I don't know that.
LifeGreatThinkMy LifeYouPerson
I feel like women bond with other women in this nonverbal way, where they take on each other's gestures. You start dressing more like each other, you eat the same food... It's a way of expressing regard: I want to be like you. Which is flattering, but if you view it another way, terrifying.
WomenFoodStartBondViewYou
We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.
FunnyTimeChoicesToolsFeelDoing
You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it's constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you'll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes.
HappyWorldYouFindSometimesWay
A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it's pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that.
LoveLove IsWritingWorldStrange
'I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.
YourselfEmpathySpaceYouPerson
Remembering who I am is a really active task for me. And I often have to tell myself, 'You're a graduate student,' 'You're a daughter,' et cetera, in situations where I'm supposed to behave like one.
DaughterMyselfI AmMeYouStudent
We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other.
PeopleThinkPresentLiteratureWay
I'm really interested in passivity as a type of action - sort of allowing the situation to change you, choosing to give in being an act of agency rather than an act of submission.
ChangeActionYouSituationAct
I don't really buy the death-drive thing too literally; it feels overly neat and convenient. But I am suspicious of fighting back being the dominant model for cinematic conflict and personal conflict and political conflict.
I AmConflictFightingPoliticalBuy
I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.
WorkEyesThinkMomentumYouWay
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