How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

Fred Moten wrote, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves.”[7]

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.

Good stories, like photographs, freeze meaning; they turn memory into memorized lines.

It’s just a job. It’s just sitting, waiting, zoning out, and being a piece of a machine, and sometimes I’m too tired and it’s too big and I’m just one piston.

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?

Like Grace Jones said: “I am diplomatic now. I could run for presidency now. I know how to play the game. But it’s tricky for me to be diplomatic—it does not come easy. I find it manipulative and insincere. You have to manipulate your own self to get the results you need without actually expressing how you really feel.”[1]

A friend tells me women don’t remember giving birth very well. Memory is actually much worse when we’re stressed, she says.

Solomon-Godeau writes of Oldoini: “The lack of any clear boundary between self and image, the collapse of distinctions between interiority and specularity, are familiar, if extreme manifestations of the cultural construction of femininity.”[5]

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]