Women Authors From The United States

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"When I ask Shulman if she is surprised that women are still having such bad sex, her response is swift. “Not really,” she says. “And the reason is that the power relations between genders haven’t changed much. I think it takes a lot of trust and caring for good sex to happen—for women at least.”"

"I just do the best I can to face what life brings. That’s the secret, you know. That’s the way you change your fate."

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."

"I don't think it's a good idea to compare yourself to anyone. You are who you are and no one can write the way you do. I always want to tell that to young writers. The most important thing is to tell your story."

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong. This fact should have been obvious to me from the beginning of my writing career, when my most acclaimed early published piece, the one nominated for a major award, wasn't the one about Jewish historical sites in Spain but rather the one about death camps. I made a point of resisting this reality, asking people at my public talks if they could name three death camps, and then asking the same people if they could name three Yiddish authors-the language spoken by over 80 percent of death-camp victims. What, I asked, was the point of caring so much about how people died, if one cared so little about how they lived? (Introduction)"

""Censorship" is beside the point, the insane extremes of "cancel culture" extravagantly irrelevant, because this double helix of hate and art is built into our world. ("Commuting with Shylock")"

"My understanding of romantic relationships in literature, where men endlessly pursuing women is regarded as idealistic and romantic, whereas women endlessly pursuing men is regarded as pathetic."

"Judaism is much bigger on commitment than fulfillment."

"The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down. This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews' bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don't experience bigotry because they are "white," itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don't experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white)."

"Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility — and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all. People who hate us know this. You don’t need to read the latest screed by a hater to know that unhinged killers feel entitled to freedom without any obligations to others. The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit anti-Semitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence. Societies that accept Jews have flourished. Societies that reject us have withered, fading into history’s night. I don’t know what to tell my children about this horror, but I do know what to tell you. The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to each other: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility. Our night of vigil has already begun."

"The desire for immortality usually comes from a desire to fulfill one’s ambitions, but women’s lives have traditionally been focused not on ambition, but on obligation. So while immortality might be attractive to a man who sees it as a way to fulfill endless ambitions, an immortal woman in most historical periods would more likely be thinking, “Seriously? I have to do all that AGAIN?”"

"[W]hen a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere"” with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding."

"The only real difference between Webster’s project and YIVO’s is that, for six million devastating reasons, YIVO’s failed and Webster’s succeeded. Its success can be measured by the millions of viewers who watched this year’s national spelling bee — and by the bee’s many gifted contestants, who are too young to appreciate the pain and loss that hides behind so many of the words they get “right.”"

"How old we all are, eternally old, forever holding hands with the past."

"It reminds me of that anemic element of the way I grew up in a community where it was like, here’s Jewish history: There was a shtetl, and there was a Holocaust, and now there’s Israel."

"You can’t write without inventing."

"Our world may be a waiting room, but it is a crowded one, filled with people shouting, singing and whispering words that those sitting right beside them only rarely understand. Perhaps the World to Come is best understood not as an afterlife, but as the future — an unexpected place where possibilities will travel on rafts of language, ready for someone to draw them up onto dry land."

"[M]y question is, what are the ways that we might be erasing ourselves to make other people comfortable?... [W]e are so often asked to erase ourselves too, and to devote ourselves to making other people comfortable. Is there a way that making people uncomfortable could make all of us be more able to flourish?"

"(Do you have any advice for aspiring writers of color?) Build community. You won’t get very far without it. You have to support other writers. Read and promote as much as you can. Also, you have to come to terms with rejection. Not everyone is going to love your work, and that’s ok. You just have to keep going. No matter how accomplished you may be, you probably won’t escape it. Write because you love it, not for fame or recognition."

"I relished especially the stories she shares about being a wanderer savoring her solitude, a rare gift for a woman, but absolutely essential for any writer."

"Lessons on Expulsion marks the arrival of a vital new voice in American poetry. With penetrating intelligence and lyrical precision, Erika L. Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her deft braiding of the beautiful and the grotesque infuses her language with a shimmering rawness and a startling immediacy. Her gaze is unflinching and feminist; it marvels and questions and testifies. Lessons on Expulsion is an uncompromising and singular debut."

"I mostly find myself writing in Spanglish. I think and feel in both languages."

"I feel that books choose me when they’re ready. I can’t force them into being."

"Erika’s writing grabs a hold and won’t let go. She’s equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy"

"A rare one with phosphorescent night-powers & deep-fire mind tools, Erika L. Sánchez"

"(“Mexican Daughter” has been banned in a few places. Do you feel if your book has been banned, you’ve actually done something right?) A: I think a lot of people who are upset about these books haven’t read any of them. They’ve just been fed all of these lies that they just perpetuate. I would really like to know, what was it that was so offensive? The mention of abortion, the mention of drugs? I guess people have a problem with that. But I think what people really have a problem with is the title. Because we’re not supposed to take up space. And our stories haven’t been allowed into the mainstream until now and so people are mad that their kids are going to be reading about some ‘hood, Mexican chick in Chicago, It’s so silly to me...It’s very upsetting that they’re so afraid of new ideas and the truth that they hide these texts, hide information to keep this lie going of what the world is."

"I talk about a lot of the things that I talked about in the book in class: I’m always discussing mental health. I’m discussing racism, all the “isms.” I just want them to have information and to have choices because I felt like I didn’t have a lot of choices myself."

"A lot of people asked: Why did you start with your vagina? Because I don’t think it’s nasty."

"Women of color are regularly praised for our resilience, but what's too often overlooked is that our resilience is a response to so many forms of violence. For us, resilience is more than a noble trait; it's a lifestyle that oppression has demanded of us. Either we adapt or we die. Even so, we need not be mere caricatures. Our stories matter, despite what the rest of society would like us to believe."

"We all see different versions of the same thing. I have written the truest book I was capable of creating. It's the way I've always made sense of the world and my life."

"Poetry is kind of a constant in my life and so that’s something that just won’t ever change because poetry is what allows me to write the prose that I do."

"I consider Toni Morrison the patron saint of my writing. To write with her level of honesty and clarity is my North Star. Virginia Woolf is referenced in this book again and again, both for her work and for her tragic life, which, I suppose, are one and the same. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz became a model for my rebellion. And the list goes on and on. None of my books could have been written without these extraordinary authors. I'm indebted to all the women who came before, those who paved the way as well as those whose talents were extinguished, buried, or sublimated because the world was afraid of their strength. It's thanks to their rebellions, big and small, that I get to lead this extraordinary life-that is, a life completely of my choosing. I am myself in a world that pressures me to be otherwise, a world that doesn't love me, wasn't for me."

"Kids really do see through our bull and have shorter attention spans."

"(Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?) Money. White authors often write about money (or don’t) in a way that disregards the realities of most people. It’s as if they assume that everyone simply has it. Or at least their readers. I remember reading “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong, many years ago, for instance, and getting very angry when the protagonist went to Europe for months with no concern for money or a job. I assumed she was relying on family money, but it was never explained. It took me out of the text because I couldn’t get over it. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did. Marginalized people could never in their wildest dreams make these kinds of choices. That’s why I always write about the financial realities of my characters. I don’t expect everyone to assume what they are. Those details really matter to me."

"Erika L. Sánchez writes with persistent care. . . . Reading Sánchez's poems is like watching the world from a train, the exquisite rhythmic blend of the known and the unknown. The world remains always more than we can understand, yet suddenly, thanks to her great poetry, we are pierced by what we know."

"I think, for the most part, borders are bullshit. I have trouble accepting the notion that governments have the right to tell people where they can and can’t go. I’m always suspicious of binaries, whether physical or metaphorical."

"I grew up thinking I didn't matter, that no one cared what I had to say. The world didn't see me, a daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants, and what it did see, it considered disposable, inconsequential. I rarely found portrayals of anyone like me-bookish and poor and surly and Brown-in the art that I enjoyed. I searched everywhere for a model for the life I wanted, but found few. I wanted to be a writer and travel around the world, but I had no idea how I was going to make that happen. I saw only snippets of that kind of life here and there. Texts like the poetry of Sandra Cisneros were a lifeline. Here was a Mexican girl from Chicago who'd become a writer and traveled alone through Europe. But texts like hers were rare finds for me, because, it seemed, I was the only one in my immediate vicinity looking for them. My teachers didn't often teach books by people of color, and I didn't have mentors or access to the internet, which was rudimentary at that time. The libraries in my community were so limited and hostile toward children that I began stealing books from the bookstore. Today, of course, I know that there were other books out there at the time that spoke to who I was, but they didn't make it into my hands very often. So when no template existed, I did what Lucille Clifton wrote about in her poem "won't you celebrate with me" and made it up."

"Remember Cynthia Ozick's story, "The Shawl"? In that extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesn't once mention the word, Holocaust; she focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her two daughters trying to survive the horrors of death-camp internment. That's what good fiction does, and should do."

"Cynthia Ozick, in her landmark feminist essay "Notes Toward Finding the Right Question," has strikingly if shockingly-lamented the exclusion of women from the tradition of Jewish learning and creativity as "one of the cruelest events in Jewish history.""

"I've read...some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick."

"("On why she writes") Because I can't not. I mean, what else am I going to do with my life? That's another way of putting it. I simply must. Writers simply can't help themselves. In a way they're sort of like the queen of England. Every writer is doomed to his or her profession. What else is the queen going to do with her life? She was born a queen; she's stuck. And writers are stuck, too."

"I don't think one writes for immortality. I think beginning writers always think they will have fame. But if fame — which is power — is what you want, then you'll get it, probably. But it's not something necessary to want or need."

"She is the master of the casual, searing image; in a department store in Foreign Bodies, a woman is ambushed by "floating tongues of perfume". During an awkward conversation between two people "a stillness blundered between them." In Heir to the Glimmering World, Professor Mitwisser, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, has eyes "acutely blue . . . I was shocked by their waver of bewilderment – like heat vibrating across a field.""

"Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition."

"there was a time when a new novel came out — let's take Saul Bellow — and it was a public event. And really, it wasn't just an elitist hobby. I remember — this goes way, way back into my early childhood — when Gone with the Wind was published, the world was whirling around this novel. I remember walking to school and seeing shopkeepers sitting outside their shops reading Gone with the Wind. This was an event. It changed people's minds. Maybe I have a yearning for that, though I don't see it would ever happen again. On the other hand, didn't we see that with Downton Abbey? So maybe it isn't all lost."

"I have argued this question, novel versus essays, and I do come out on the novel side. Because though both these forms use intellect and imagination, they do it in different proportions — the essay more on the intellect side and the novel more on the imaginative side. And the imaginative is freedom. You're at liberty to inhabit other people — including the bad guys — which is sometimes very thrilling, since you won't do it in real life. (On how imagining "the bad guy" relates to empathy) It's the beginning of empathy, indeed. And it's also a place where you can make judgments, where you can enter other people's minds and at the same time subtly, not didactically, not as if you're giving a sermon or a tract. But you can also make judgments, and they can be social judgments, moral judgments, metaphysical judgments."

"I always knew that this was what I wanted to do. I think this is true of most writers — especially anybody who's read Little Women, which is every writer. Not so much the male writers, let's admit it, but every writer who grows up has wanted to be Jo."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography)."