I'm A Private Person, A

But I've Married A Deeply Sensible Person Who Is Extremely Good At Talking Me Down From My Various Ledges, And Who Takes Care Of Me In A Billion Ways.

Reading About Utopianism, And Eventually Creating Characters With Their Own Utopian Ambitions, Was The Way I Learned To Live With Being A Pregnant Person, To Stave Off The Sense Of Incipient Disaster. You're Bringing A Person Into This Overcrowded World, Knowing They're One Day Going To Die And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

I'm Feminist In That I Believe That There Should Be Equality Between Men And Women. I Get Deeply Frustrated On A Daily Basis By The Enormous Gender Divide In The U.s. Literary World. But I Don't Know How To Deal With It, So I Don't Tend To Say Much About It.

Sex Makes Things Strained. There Are Lovely People In Oneida, But Everyone Was Married To Everyone Else. And You Had Fathers And Mothers Watching Their Twelve-year-old Daughters Being Inducted Into The Group Marriage By Sixty-five-year-old Men. There Are Creepy Aspects Of A Lot Of Intentional Communities When It Comes To Sex.

When I Was Small And Easily Wounded Books Were My Carapace. If I Were Recalled To My Hurts In The Middle Of A Book They Somehow Mattered Less. My Corporeal Life Was Slight The Dazzling One In My Head Was What Really Mattered. Returning To Books Was Coming Home.