hannah

“There was a time when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help. I was unhappy, and ashamed of it; I was baffled by my life. For several years in my early thirties, I would sit in my armchair reading books about these other lives. Sometimes when I came to the end, I would sit down and read the book through from the beginning again. I remember an incredible intensity about all this, and also a kind of furtiveness—as if I were afraid that someone might look through the window and find me out. Even now, I feel I should pretend that I was reading only these women's fiction or their poetry—their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked—the journals and letters, and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth. I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.”
― Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence

“I thought you died, but writing this, I'm not sure you did.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Virginia Woolf described in her fiction her chracters' pain in childhood way and linked it to their emotional lives as adults in a way that was ahead of its time. "It's a fallacy to think that children are unhappy... I've never suffered so much as I did when I was a child," says Richard Dalloway M.P., in The Voyage Out. ”
― Kennedy Fraser

“Shutting down behind self-pity and secret shame; sacrificing themselves to childish mothers and selfish men; vaguely yearning, self-medicating; painting someone else's pictures; obediently tracing the magic circle. afraid, entranced. There are so many different ways to drown.”
― Kennedy Fraser, Ornament and Silence