How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

I think these writers are confronted: If she is no longer a beautiful woman in front of the camera, then what is she possibly doing there?

Both of them helped me consider that the response to something broken isn’t a big resolution, it’s in the sweeping, baking, planting, building, and caring for the world we need to live in every day.

When you spend time calibrating for the mood and comfort of those around you, it’s like a radio that’s always on. When it turns off, emptiness.

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

I worry that when I do not explain exactly where my income and my voice come from, I am helping export the American myth, the one that promises opportunity while it promotes hierarchy.[8]

And the ability to disassociate is also what made me successful: Without my own emotion getting in the way, the audience could find room for their own response.

when it made me ignore my strength because it wasn’t as valuable as my flexibility, I ignored so much of myself that what I considered acts of perseverance in fact left me with little to persevere for.

I am being paid to be disposable, to sell clothes that are disposable, to sell something I have no right to sell, to be someone I dislike, to be uncomfortable, until I can no longer see my whole self because I also see what they see and give it willingly.

A quiltmaking theory of storytelling: Save and collect things, especially those worn beyond repair. Honor the labor that came before. Cut and piece together. Sew. Iron. Stand back. Cut, sew again. Allow for pattern and juxtaposition to provide narrative structure. Allow feeling to inform logic, use a quilter’s math, sometimes intricate, sometimes i