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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
well written but personally did not find it particularly engaging or insightful
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Sexism, Sexual harassment
Moderate: Rape
Minor: Domestic abuse, Homophobia
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Interesting memoir of the interesting author ("Men Explain Things to Me.") Her development as a struggling artist in San Francisco and how she found her voice. I have not read enough of her books to know all of her references, but still nice to listen to.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
The names of the colors are sometimes cages, containing what doesn't belong there. And this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond. (ch 1)
Mr. Teal was always dressed elegantly, in some variation on a sportcoat and a fedora often with tweed and texture. He was a stylish man who told me stories about the Filmore district's jazzy heyday but also a devout man of great and radiant kindness and graciousness, living proof that cool and warmth could emanate from the same source. (ch 2)
The young writer I met there didn't know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion. An attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said. ... She'd collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn't yet know what voice was hers, or rather, she had not yet made one. (ch 5)
... though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are, and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value. But when it comes to writing, every chapter you chapter you write is surrounded by those you don't. ... only so much of the chaos can be sifted and herded onto the pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You're not carving marble, you're grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river. You can arrange the detritus, but you can't write the whole river. (ch 6)
Perhaps you could tell a story the way children play hopscotch: returning to the beginning and going a little further each time, tossing your token into another square, covering the same ground in a slightly different pursuit each time. You can't tell it all at once, but you can cover the same ground a few different ways or trace one route through it. (ch 6)
Because I loved books more than almost anything. Because I regarded them as a kind of practical enchantment,
and the only way to be closer to that enchantment than reading them was writing them. I wanted to work with words and see what they could do. I wanted to gather up fragments and put them in new patterns. I wanted to be a full citizen of that ethereal otherworld. I wanted to live by books and in books and for books. It was a lovely goal, or rather orientation, when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it -- well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you're on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: a task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire, and how much to listen to them, and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. (ch 6)
The book's epigraph was James Baldwin's spectacular sentence: "It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." Meaning that it's not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality. (ch 7)
Mostly we hear from people who survive difficulties or break through barriers. And the fact that they did so is often used to suggest that difficulties or barriers were not so very serious, or that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious. The process of writing and publishing nonfiction convinced me of my own credibility and capacity to determine what was true and just, more than anything else did, and that made me able to stand up sometimes for myself or for others. (ch 7)
... but what I'd wanted to offer was encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good but to make them feel powerful. (ch 8)
In the evenings when the sky near the horizon is apricot and the sky above is still blue I sometimes try to find the seam between the two colors, but in the heavens there is only a pallor between these opposites that is easy not to notice. Sometimes too in the evening I try to watch the colors change or a shadow grow longer across the landscape, and almost always my attention flickers for a moment and then I realize that the tree that was half in light has been swallowed by darkness or the brightness and sharp shadows have suddenly diffused, because the sun has dipped or sky that was cobalt is now midnight blue. Things are one way and then another, and the transitions are hard to mark. The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure. Suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived. So much of what changed is hard for those who lived through it to remember and those who came after to imagine. In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because it’s too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room. Myriad forms of injustice became visible in ways it made it seem normal to recognize them and easy to forget by what toil it became visible (which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see and for what failings future eras will rebuke us). (chapter 8, part 2)
The essay poured out with ease, or rather, tumbled out, seemingly of its own accord. When this happens, it means that the thoughts have long been gestating, and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form, out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that, your job is to get out of its way. (ch 8)
There's a Buddhist phrase about the work of Bodhisattva as the liberation of all beings. I see feminism as a subset of that work. (ch 8)
A writer's voice is supposed to be hers alone. It's what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it's not quite style and not just tone or subject. It's something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. (ch 8)
But sometimes you revisit the past, as I have in this book, to map the distance covered. There is closure and reopening, and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added. (afterword)
Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me. And that might be the pinnacle of my career, to be somehow an occasion for someone else's exuberance. We'd never set eyes on each other before, but that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers. (afterword)
And then my friend who had given me the desk sent me a letter to approve what I had written about her that ended with a line from William Stafford: "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." People aren't really meant to be anything, because we're not made; we're born, with some innate tendencies and thereafter molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters. Despite everything, suggest the forces that try to stop a person or change her nature and purpose, and who you were meant to be suggests that those forces did not altogether succeed. It was a lovely fortune to be handed by a stranger, and I took it, and with it the sense that who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of the cracks and sometimes a repairwoman, and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry: the stories waiting to be told and the stories that set us free. (afterword)
Mr. Teal was always dressed elegantly, in some variation on a sportcoat and a fedora often with tweed and texture. He was a stylish man who told me stories about the Filmore district's jazzy heyday but also a devout man of great and radiant kindness and graciousness, living proof that cool and warmth could emanate from the same source. (ch 2)
The young writer I met there didn't know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion. An attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said. ... She'd collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn't yet know what voice was hers, or rather, she had not yet made one. (ch 5)
... though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are, and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value. But when it comes to writing, every chapter you chapter you write is surrounded by those you don't. ... only so much of the chaos can be sifted and herded onto the pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You're not carving marble, you're grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river. You can arrange the detritus, but you can't write the whole river. (ch 6)
Perhaps you could tell a story the way children play hopscotch: returning to the beginning and going a little further each time, tossing your token into another square, covering the same ground in a slightly different pursuit each time. You can't tell it all at once, but you can cover the same ground a few different ways or trace one route through it. (ch 6)
Because I loved books more than almost anything. Because I regarded them as a kind of practical enchantment,
and the only way to be closer to that enchantment than reading them was writing them. I wanted to work with words and see what they could do. I wanted to gather up fragments and put them in new patterns. I wanted to be a full citizen of that ethereal otherworld. I wanted to live by books and in books and for books. It was a lovely goal, or rather orientation, when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it -- well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you're on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: a task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire, and how much to listen to them, and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. (ch 6)
The book's epigraph was James Baldwin's spectacular sentence: "It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." Meaning that it's not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality. (ch 7)
Mostly we hear from people who survive difficulties or break through barriers. And the fact that they did so is often used to suggest that difficulties or barriers were not so very serious, or that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious. The process of writing and publishing nonfiction convinced me of my own credibility and capacity to determine what was true and just, more than anything else did, and that made me able to stand up sometimes for myself or for others. (ch 7)
... but what I'd wanted to offer was encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good but to make them feel powerful. (ch 8)
In the evenings when the sky near the horizon is apricot and the sky above is still blue I sometimes try to find the seam between the two colors, but in the heavens there is only a pallor between these opposites that is easy not to notice. Sometimes too in the evening I try to watch the colors change or a shadow grow longer across the landscape, and almost always my attention flickers for a moment and then I realize that the tree that was half in light has been swallowed by darkness or the brightness and sharp shadows have suddenly diffused, because the sun has dipped or sky that was cobalt is now midnight blue. Things are one way and then another, and the transitions are hard to mark. The present becomes the past through increments too small to measure. Suddenly something that is becomes something that was, and the way we live is not the way we lived. So much of what changed is hard for those who lived through it to remember and those who came after to imagine. In many parts of American society, kindness has increasingly become a criterion applied to all forms of interaction, but its absence before was elusive, because it’s too easy to not notice who and what is not in the room. Myriad forms of injustice became visible in ways it made it seem normal to recognize them and easy to forget by what toil it became visible (which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see and for what failings future eras will rebuke us). (chapter 8, part 2)
The essay poured out with ease, or rather, tumbled out, seemingly of its own accord. When this happens, it means that the thoughts have long been gestating, and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form, out of sight. So much of the work of writing happens when you are seemingly not working, made by that part of yourself you may not know and do not control, and when the work shows up like that, your job is to get out of its way. (ch 8)
There's a Buddhist phrase about the work of Bodhisattva as the liberation of all beings. I see feminism as a subset of that work. (ch 8)
A writer's voice is supposed to be hers alone. It's what makes someone distinct and recognizable, and it's not quite style and not just tone or subject. It's something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for. (ch 8)
But sometimes you revisit the past, as I have in this book, to map the distance covered. There is closure and reopening, and sometimes something reopens because you can bring something new to it, repair it in a new way by understanding it a new way. Sometimes the meaning of the beginning of the story has changed as new chapters are added. (afterword)
Once a young woman passing by an outdoor booth where I was signing books burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me. And that might be the pinnacle of my career, to be somehow an occasion for someone else's exuberance. We'd never set eyes on each other before, but that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers. (afterword)
And then my friend who had given me the desk sent me a letter to approve what I had written about her that ended with a line from William Stafford: "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken." People aren't really meant to be anything, because we're not made; we're born, with some innate tendencies and thereafter molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters. Despite everything, suggest the forces that try to stop a person or change her nature and purpose, and who you were meant to be suggests that those forces did not altogether succeed. It was a lovely fortune to be handed by a stranger, and I took it, and with it the sense that who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of the cracks and sometimes a repairwoman, and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry: the stories waiting to be told and the stories that set us free. (afterword)