Adrienne Miller > Quotes

“I'd been spending my professional life, at GQ and Esquire both, reading fiction by men about men. The sub-subjects: The Land of Marriage. A middle-aged man coming to terms with Something. Extramarital affairs. Hotel rooms. Adult life as unwinnable game. A man trying, and failing, to be a man - whatever that thing was. A wife. A waif. Oh, God, the mothers. How many trailer parks were there upon the greensward? There sure were a lot of trains. Why were there so many prostitutes? And why were so many of the women dead? Rarely did any children appear in the stuff I read, and when they did, they tended to serve as devices for the teaching of moral lessons - touching ones, usually. And the women - voluble, irrational, rarely all that smart, but, with any luck, sexy, sexy, sexy - functioned as instruments to male enlightenment. Oh, if I had a dime for each time I read the sentence "She made me feel alive..." (to which my private stock response was always "And you made her feel dead").”
― Adrienne Miller

“Sometimes we'll get a glimpse of this greater reality - that's all we get, though, a glimpse - and then the place again withdraws, out of reach and scattering like fog.”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir

“He certainly had never been made to feel so powerless and inferior, not in such a tawdry - let's be real: sexist - way. He'd never been made to feel as if his only identity in the world were as a leech, a parasite. No, worse than that: a silly little ephemeron trifler, a life lived only in relationship to another person.”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir

“In order to write, and to live, the mask had to come off.”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir

“I'd believed that if I got this job, or even if I got any sort of power, that I wouldn't be scared anymore. I had been hoping that power was the way to undo fear. But then you learn: the fear is here to stay. The fear was always there, except when I was at my desk, with a manuscript in front of me and a pen in hand.”
― Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men: A Memoir