Arden Begley’s Reviews > Dead and Alive: Essays > Status Update

“We bend history to our will, for purposes as much personal as political” (135).

"I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read" (76).

“Girlhood seems to be one of the few periods of a woman’s life where her creativity can exist wholly without shame: unbound, feverish, selfish” (16).