Names are important in terms of how you construct your characters' identity,.. But the First Amendment is more important than anything.
Ayelet Waldman
No author loves the idea of not choosing his or her characters' names,.. Mommy Track Mystery.
mystery idea names author
identity names important
They can be either a freshman at UC San Diego with one too many piercings or a far-too-perfect Southern California mother.
mother california southern
If they want to be someone who is not loathsome, they'll have to wait till the next book.
book wait
Usually I try not to read that stuff. For someone who writes openly about her life, I have the thinnest skin. I don't like feeling that people don't like me. It makes me very upset.
life people feeling read skin
It was a group of two dozen women arrayed around this living room. Four were on my side, and the rest were trying to figure out how to hang me.
women rest living side
I've always written about maternal ambivalence. It's the subject that consumes me.
written
It's a good life in this sort of Madame Bovary way. It's beautiful and perfect and seems to be just what you want but ends up becoming a gilded cage.
life beautiful good perfect cage
That was true, Iris would sometimes think, about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts. A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance. At first your notions of your life with another were no more substantial than a pattern laid down in plywood. Then year by year you constructed the frame around the form, and began layering memories, griefs, and small triumphs like strips of veneer planking bent around the hull of everyday routine. You sanded down the rough edges, patched the misunderstandings, faired the petty betrayals. Sometimes you sprung a leak. You fell apart in rough weather or were smashed on devouring rocks. But then, as now, in the teeth of a storm, when it seemed like all was lost, the timber swelled, the leak sealed up, and you found that your craft was, after all, sea-kindly.
marriage
As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy.
pain sadness agony
Even if i'm setting myself up for failure, I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obseessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn't fret over failings and slights, who realizes her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgement of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn't worry so much about being bad or good but just recognizes that she's both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad.
parenting motherhood
I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.
motherhood
Think about it, I say. How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not.
people men
Hatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
truth business
Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?
family
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