Archive | Sabboytical

A Sometimes Snag of Sola Ladyhood

Says Elaine Blair in her review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline:

We come to feel an intimacy with [single lady protagonist] Faye that has nothing to do with disclosure; though we know conspicuously little about her, we share with her the experience of listening to others, and, as we do so, it becomes clear that a certain kind of conversation is missing from Faye’s days and nights. No one speaks to her in the casual shorthand of daily intimacy.

Says I: Comes with the turf, though a Turf of One’s Own is still worth it.

No Condition for Love

From a 1984 interview with author Edna O’Brien:

Interviewer: Some think your preoccupation with romance verges at times on the sentimental. You quote Aragon in answer: “Love is your last chance, there is really nothing else to keep you there.

O’Brien: But my work is concerned with loss as much as with love. Loss is every child’s theme and writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart. I might, if the gods are good to me, find that my understanding of love has become richer and stronger than my dread of loss.

Interviewer: Is that why, in nearly all your novels, women are longing to establish a simple, loving, harmonious relationship with men, but are unable to do so?

O’Brien: My experience was pretty extreme, so that it is hard for me to imagine harmony, or even affinity, between men and women. I would need to be reborn.

Alone, Not Lonely (‘Tracks’)

I’m knee-deep in writing a review of the film Tracks but had to share a passage from Robyn Davidson’s eponymous book, which doubles as a brilliant anthem for electively loner ladies everywhere.

I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than something to be feared. Alone, I could see more clearly what loneliness was. For the first time it flashed on me that the way I had conducted my life was always to allow myself that remoteness, always protect that high, clear place that could not be shared without risking its destruction. I had paid for this over and over with moments of neurotic despair, but it had been worth it. I had somehow always countered my desire for a knight in shining armor, by forming bonds with men I didn’t like, or with men who were so off the air that there was no hope of a permanent relationship. I could not deny this. It lay, crystal clear, beneath the feelings of inadequacy and defeat, the clever, self-directed plan that had been working toward this realization for years. I believe the subconscious always knows best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy