In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in.

I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female “I” to History changes History.

That is, writing about our own joys and wounds and sense of the world means writing in every way, always, knowing that we are the product, good or bad, of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others.

Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought. It’s not a fixed, well-defined image. The thought-vision appears as something in motion—it rises and falls—and its task is to make itself evident before disappearing.

I imagined that I was in a race against time, a race in which the writer always lagged behind.

Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read (even when it’s a question of distracted reading, the trickiest kind of reading). And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I’ve taken in.

For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?