on monsters

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

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I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. S... See more

I want to drill down on one aspect of the intro, too, because I think it’s essential: how has care “curdled,” for lack of a better word, in our minds? And what have been the implications of that degradation?

Definitely curdled. When I say the word “care” I think it often brings to mind the smell of diapers or that unpleasant combo of urine and disi... See more

Whatever initial appeal this argument has, it owes to the unpleasantness of corporate drudgery in general, not to the predicament of female corporate drudges in particular. Invariably, the job that features in articles like Andrews’s is soul-sucking, pointless and therefore presumed to have been chosen solely for the prestige it confers (although s... See more

That he could only benefit from having a wife whereas she could only suffer from having a husband? That they could fuck on equal terms but anything more than that would inevitably cost her? Wives and mothers were not art. Nobody wanted to be reminded of domesticity, of mundanity, mediocrity. And weren’t all mothers mediocre? All wives eventually mu

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A man or woman obsessed is a force of nature. There is mightiness in desire, and the desire to create, to refine a craft, is perhaps one of the greatest desires of all.

“It is never as often as we would like that a beautiful and brilliant woman steps away from her assigned role of helpmeet, of mother, of daughter and muse. So we celebrate the ones who we believe – on some artistic plane – were set free.”