Sublime

During my drinking decades, I lived like a pig. My room was a hazardous pile of stilettos, tube tops, wine bottles, ashtrays, and old magazines. I valued nothing. Everything that came into my life was disposable: clothes, opportunities, people. My bedroom looked as if my insides had spilled out onto the floor.

Dans The Year of Learning Dangerously, Quinn Cummings raconte comment elle a instruit sa fille Alice à la maison : « Avec son père, nous connaissions Alice mieux que personne et nous ne pouvions plus ignorer qu’elle ne faisait pas grand-chose à l’école. Comme l’on dit lorsqu’on est à court d’euphémismes pour parler de “relâchement”, notre fille “n’

On a good day, I couldn’t tell who was giving what to whom.

in my marriage, my parenting, my writing, and my doctoring—has been the work of the loud, curvy, curly headed girl, operating on instinct and without self-consciousness. And every wrong turn I’ve ever taken has been in pursuit of those hanging plants, symbols of the woman I thought I was supposed to be. Curvy Curly always wins. Always.

Eventually she begins to disappear into furniture, against walls, her bare ends blending into things like the end of a brushstroke. Perhaps this is the reason they begin to forget that she is there; they cannot find her edges, the parts of her to pull out from the background to identify her by. They walk past her, talk through her, and are surprise

The air outside rumbles as planes lift into the sky, while inside garbled announcements blare over the loudspeaker. Somewhere behind me, an older woman speaks in sharp, staccato Italian. But I don’t look away from the curb, my eyes trained on the crowded sidewalk outside the terminal, searching for her, anchoring my belief—and my entire future—on t

Karen Horney led a restless life, full of shifting passions and allegiances. But in one thing she was consistent: her independence of mind.