Writing as Transformation

It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started to write.

I came from a family of talkers. But talk, in my house, was not conversation. Talk was holding forth. Prevailing. Having the last word. Only one person could do it at a time, which meant that there was constant barging in and interruption, as impatience to speak grew more feverish and more relentless. Everybody wanted to talk. Nobody wanted to listen. In this, I was exactly like my mother and my father and my sister, though we had, each of us, a distinctive style.

More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted. Paradox. But an interrupted paradox is not simply edited—it is fundamentally changed, sometimes into the orderly, reasonable opposite it seemed destined to be. Because I never got to finish what I intended to say, a response (on the rare occasions when one was given) never seemed a response to my thought but, rather, to the simplified idea it had become.

I came to have a sense that the self I was in the world, among other selves, was alternately precarious and invisible. I did not think speech was a good conduit to the self, or expression of it, because in my childhood it was not. The page was different. Here my voice had a stability and an immutability, qualities that I passionately craved and never remotely approached in my social interactions. How could I? Stability and immutability are not characteristics of the spoken word.

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