Does Being Happy Simply Create

It Doesn't Ever Occur To You, As You Fashion Your Mask So Carefully, That It Will Grow Into Your Skin And Graft Itself, Come To Seem Irremovable.

Nobody Would Know Me From My Own Description Of Myself; Which Is Why, When Called Upon (rarely, I Grant) To Provide An Account, I Tailor It, I Adapt, I Try To Provide An Outline That Can, In Some Way, Correlate To The Outline That People Understand Me To Have -- That, I Suppose, I Actually Have, At This Point. But Who I Am In My Head, Very Few People Really Get To See That. Almost None. It's The Most Precious Gift I Can Give, To Bring Her Out Of Hiding.

There's A Reason Why Trainspotters Are Not Girls, There's A Reason Why There's The Myth Of The Slightly Autistic Male Genius, There's A Reason Why Gertrude Stein Believed That Her Self-presentation Was Male. One Could Argue That Was Susan Sontag Also. The Things That We Associate With Femaleness Are Not The Single-minded, Exclusive Pursuit Of A Vocation, Whether It Be Art Or Anything Else. It Is Not A Model That Is Widespread In Our Culture, It's Not Something We Think Of For Women.

Anyway, These Books I Love, They’re All Books By Men—every Last One Of Them. Because If It’s Unseemly And Possibly Dangerous For A Man To Be Angry, It’s Totally Unacceptable For A Woman To Be Angry. I Wanted To Write A Voice That For Me, As A Reader, Had Been Missing From The Chorus: The Voice Of An Angry Woman.

The Professor Husband Of A Friend Of Mine Has Likened Children To The Insane. I Often Think Of It. He Says That Children Live On The Edge Of Madness, That Their Behavior, Apparently Unmotivated, Shares The Same Dream Logic As Crazy People's. I See What He Means, And Because I've Learned To Be Patient With Children, To Tease Out The Logic That's Always Somewhere There, And Irrefutable Once Explained.