Heroines

after all, we must be our own heroines.

This is a memory campaign. Who is canonized, who is remembered. It begins with reviews and filters down to who is taught in schools and then whose papers are collected by which library.

Once they are diagnosed, every aspect of their biography is read and interpreted according to the disease. Their identities are married to the diagnosis.

how girls are trained — to be nice, liked, no, loved. To not show the ugliness. Also this desire not to be disowned (yet we are already disowned by the culture, pushed back in the minor supporting role).

I hadn’t even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn’t speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac’s On the Road didn’t speak to me, because he kept on writing about jumping into girls, and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

with girls there’s less of a belief in their future genius.

idea of tradition is important. If she only sees herself as a character in the books she is given, these characters that are often pathologized, can she have the audacity to dream of being an author?

the notion that girls don’t burn and suffer and twist themselves inside out with the desire to write.

I said to her, firmly, to write, for fuck’s sake, to write, to fuck up and write about it and learn from it and never ever believe the bullshit that what she has experienced is not potentially all the valid stuff of literature.

The entire history of Western literature is dominated by absolute pricks, I realize, pricks that can’t get hard but yet ejaculate with such eloquent language,