I’m Not A Writing Group

Popular Success Is A Wonderful Gift If It Happens, But Like Money, It's Not The Motivation. The Effort To Create A Work Of Art That Is True And Potentially Lasting, That Is The Very Best Work Of Art You Can Create At That Point In Your Life - A Book That May Only Reach Or Move A Few People But Will Seem To People Somehow Transformative. That's The Ideal; That's Always The Motivation.

We Live In A Funny Time, A Funny Era, When Desire, To Be Adult Desire, Has To Be Conceived As Sexual. And That Didn't Used To Be The Case. Sexuality Is A Social Construction As Much As Anything Else And I Think The Realities Of Sexuality Don't Always Fit Into The Social Constructions That We Have, And We Live In A Goal-oriented Time - On All Fronts.

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.

I Always Say To My Students, If You Can Do Anything Other Than Writing And Be Happy, Then You Should.