Mary's Reviews > Heroines

“The specter of the ‘ugly’ feminist that still haunts us. For I still don’t want to be an ugly woman and when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or make-up, don’t leave the house for days, I forget what it’s like to be outside, a body a body lumpy from lack of exercise and a hasty daily diet.”

1) I can count on one hand the theory-related texts I've read that discuss mental health + creative production in a way I find responsible, helpful, and honest. That hand is holding this book.

2) Until reading this, I didn't realize that I have absolutely always considered myself a character, not an author. It's such an obvious extension of the agent/target, subject/object breakdown that it never occurred to me that I was aiding and abetting the cannibalization of my own experiences for other people's narratives.

3) The past 15 books I've read were the mediocre dates I had to get through in order to find this one. This one was the date that said, "Hey, bedmate, you are so, so good and so, so competent, and so, so enough. So enough you are excessive. I am, too."

4) In extension, this book has torn the covers off my relationship to reading--you know, in the "time to wake up, no more of this microfleece cage bullshit" type of way. It's not enough for reading to be consumptive--or narcotic (p.21)--it needs to be bothersome. It needs to activate my body, make me ugly, make me gush. In a way, it's only fair: writing is painful (I'm thinking of debridement, the act of cutting off necrotic or infected tissue in order to stimulate healing); it seems cheap to allow such a friction-less devouring.

5) Sometimes I fantasize about authors going on Goodreads when they feel like hot shit and reading through all the five star reviews (I choose to fantasize about this over the horrifying opposing reality, where the entire Internet is the rudest writing workshop and those one star reviews are always waiting.) I think about how these writers would consider my five stars. In this case, my five stars are a way of saying, "Thanks, Kate. This book is as important as you think it is. You know that girl you shook by the shoulders, hoping to shake her the fuck up and get her writing? Congratulations on publishing that shake."