Kate Zambreno Quotes

I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.

How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.

I wake up and read although Nietzsche says that's foolish. A sort of narcotic, reading. I read with my hands down the front of my pants - my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books.

She likes the bad boys the ones that are bad for her. Maggie is SELF-DESTRUCTIVE. She has the love instinct and the death instinct and they are in an eternal cage match inside her head. This

People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.

Sometimes she is struck by how much she goes through life almost unconsciously. She is being swept along. She is a pale ghost.

She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.

The green girl necessarily pines for the past, because the present is too uncomfortable to be present in and the future, unimaginable. The need to long, to desire that which she cannot have, that which has eluded her, because she deceives herself that it was this person, this chance, where she would have found happiness.

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

The passivity of the green girl masquerades as politeness

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as "confessional." She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic's courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…

I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don't know how or why yet.

My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia.

I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that's the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr - excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual - or if formal books will emerge at all, if that's not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I'm excited by the possibility.

People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.

I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.

It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.

The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.

Ruth loved color so much she rarely wore any. Except on her face.

And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it's really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I'm contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein's line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon's too, there's another anecdote. And it's burned in my brain his

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.

It is again the season for a woman with a strong identity, the magazine tells Ruth. Could she, did she have it in her to update her visual sense of herself?

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don't love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he's horrible to her, and that's what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that.

You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille's ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you're writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don't typically get with the 'whore' or the 'slut' or the sexual girl.

Ruth's days off always oppress her. The realm of choice paralyzes her. To sleep is to choose neither life nor death.

On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.

I am home because I am a writer, but sometimes, when I'm not productive (productivity: the expectations of capitalism), I feel like a terrible housewife, or a sick person.

We live in such fear of puncturing the moment, of forgetting our lines.

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: "The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.

Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection.

But then other times Maggie is a very bad girl yes a very bad girl because she doesn't care whether they love her anymore. This is when Maggie is filled with HATE. This is when Maggie rebels. Maggie has always had an edge on her that Maggie. It

The most important part of an introduction always occurs in one's absence.

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.

I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.

I once told a very serious writer/poet I knew about how obsessed I was with various women's lives. I think I was talking about Vivien Leigh at the time, as I was working on a book dealing with former screen legends, that I have since abandoned. Or perhaps the mad wives. I don't know. This poet was very serious, very pure. Derrida in the AM. Pronouncing his name correctly. That sort of thing. She fixed me with some look - this was maybe 7 years ago - and said - more than a bit dismissingly - oh, you're very interested with lives. Or maybe she said: Oh, you're very interested in these women's lives. And I said, yes, I guess I am. I remember feeling guilty - like this wasn't a writerly thing to be interested in, the subject of others' lives. That this was gossip. That being unliterary, somehow. This devouringness. I have since realized that most of the works I'm interested in, are about absolute obsession with other people's lives, often real-people's lives, and these works become unserious biographies, avant-garde acts of gossip, while still working within the structure of the novel.

What does she want to be? A green girl doesn't like to consider this question. She is waiting around to be discovered just for being herself.

I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.