95. READ.LOOK.THINK.
READ: Moving Helen Garner’s books. | “I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?” | Of other people: “she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word.” | On being fictionalised: “Because the shock of recognition is so acute, the fictionalized often fail to grasp how impersonally their “personal” material is used—or how minor a role “their” material plays.” | “…as an artist, not having parents is really the jam.” | Nobody’s looking at you. | I LOVED My Salinger Year, read beautifully on audiobook by the author. Excited to read: The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (Netherland is now one of my favourite books); Nobody is ever missing.
LOOK: Downtown in the flesh, upstate in the mind. | Sex and the City scripts. |
THINK: Relatability is the shitty version of nailing it. | Mothers aren’t leaving the workforce because they can’t hack it. It’s because they’re rational economic actors. | When writers attack bad PR, the unspoken heart of their criticism is the failure on the part of the publicist to adequately conceal that she is performing emotional work for money.
