Let Me Tell You What I Mean

I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

Of course my mother and father wanted me to be happy, and of course they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my affair.

This entire notion of “the perfect mom/wife/homemaker,” of the “nostalgic siren call for a return to Fifties-style homemaking,” is a considerable misunderstanding of what Martha Stewart actually transmits, the promise she makes her readers and viewers, which is that know-how in the house will translate to can-do outside it.

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.

It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered “well-informed” to precisely the extent that we know “the real story,” the story not in the newspaper.

We are all from somewhere. And it’s the artist’s job to question the values that went into the making of that somewhere.

And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer’s particular bias.

The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of “feminine” domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.