Bri

“She wanted us to remember that, and I did. It felt like she was with me always, metaphorically at least. And in a way it was literal too. When we'd finally laid down that tombstone and spread her ashes into the dirt, I hadn't spread them all. I'd kept a few of the largest chunks in my hand. I'd stood for a long while, not ready to release them. I never ever would.
I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild A Journey from Lost to Found, Into the Wild, Into Thin Air 3 Books Collection Set

“To William H. Gass's argument, "To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster," I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, and its devastation.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“No more Gifted Girl with Lots of Potential. No more grandiose intentions of being a writer when I grow up, never realized because the products never come right and so I'm safer to sit than to start the inevitable failure. This is all the grown up I get to be. No more "dream" world, more perfect than the "real" world, waiting if only I can find the small golden key: in which I love and rear my children without pain; in which I gratify my husband's slenderest desire; in which I dust all the surfaces in my room every morning instead of at Christmas and Easter; in which I understood how to solve a basic quadratic equation; in which someone discovers all the poems I haven't written and publishes them in The New Yorker. There is one world--this world--and I made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me.
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to the other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Nancy Mairs, Plaintext: Essays

“That night, sitting on the floor of Nancy’s perfectly constructed living room in a beam of bright moonlight coming through the sliding glass doors, I wrote the pages they had asked for: “These girls are overeducated and underemployed, sure that they’re too smart for their positions as assistants, nannies, and waitresses but not necessarily motivated enough to prove it (or even do their jobs well enough to advance). They have that mix of know-it-all entitlement and scathing self-deprecation that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many twenty-four-year-old women with liberal arts degrees. They have varying degrees of ambition but have been raised to achieve. They know they want to be successful long before they know what they want to be successful at.”
― Lena Dunham, Famesick