Incidental Inventions

I was a terrible mother, a great mother. Pregnancy changes everything: our body, our feelings, the hierarchical order of our lives. The convention by which we have always considered ourselves one and indivisible fails. Now we have two hearts, all our organs are duplicated, our sex is doubled—we are female plus female or female plus male. And we are divisible, not metaphorically but in the acute reality of our body.

Because writing is innately artificial, its every use involves some form of fiction.

I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking.

We always look at first times with excessive indulgence. Even if by their nature they’re founded on inexperience, and so as a rule are not very successful, we recall them with sympathy, with regret.

I am one of those people who never like the way they look in photographs or videos.

men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.

We shouldn’t put off writing until we’ve lived enough, read sufficiently, have a desk of our own in a room of our own with a garden overlooking the sea, have been through intense experiences, lived in a stimulating city, retreated to a mountain hut, have had children, have travelled extensively.

The art of discouraging with kind words is among the most widely practised.

I’m not interested in writing something new. I’m interested in the ordinary or, rather, what we have forced inside the uniform of the ordinary. I’m interested in digging into that and causing confusion, pushing myself to go beyond appearances.

Ever since adolescence, I’ve liked the term “unknown.”