“Discourse about motherhood is chillingly narrow-minded. It’s a tool the patriarchy uses, of course. So people complain about their kids or they complain about the pain of birth or they make motherhood kitschy, Mother’s Day-y. Much of the writing I do about the female body is to remind women, myself included, that they make life and they make death. That strikes me as a far more powerful stance than the weak lies told about mothering (dinner, discipline, worry, etc.). There is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness. Mothers are experts in these fields. I hope people can learn to listen to them, learn to be like them and acknowledge the wisdom there before it is too late. I hope people can learn how to serve others.”
“Part of what America is saying in 2016 is that 1930s German fascism is here and real, and people who accept its fictions as fact feel entitled to inventory and murder men and women whose ethnicities and sexualities they don’t share. This is, of course, directly connected to the worldview and actions of our country’s founders, who owned slaves and rationalized slavery, which included the right to inventory, and commit violence against, the bodies of the humans they considered their property. These are self-evident truths that we must continue fighting.”
“This was a big piece of what I wanted to consider. I don’t exactly feel like I have a polemic in me to be written, but I think reckoning with another person’s choice to stop treatment is an essential and complicated reckoning. We have increasingly more medicines, which is great. And for many people who learn there are no more treatment options, the possibility of new protocols would be a gift. But there are also essential conversations to be had about what a person wants to endure, how a person defines what “living” means to them. For some the secondary health problems from years of treatment become unbearable. And a limited life is not a life they want to continue just because medicines can keep them alive. This is a difficult conversation. And it’s not a static, singular one. Each person’s threshold for what it is to have a life, to be alive, is radically different and shifts at stages in a life.”
“There’s always three versions of people: the version you know, the version they are, and the version you hear about from whoever, whenever. Some folks are really great at some things and the worst humans ever at others. Some people can’t even drink a glass of water without starting a forest fire. But others save your life just by blinking at you.”
“Before the mp3 there was the CD, before the CD there was the cassette, before the cassette there was the 8-track, before the 8-track there was the record, before the record there were player pianos, before player pianos there were pianos and organs and sheet music and hands. What prejudices do I hold regarding the format my information comes packaged in? How do those prejudices inspire the guilt and anxiety I feel about the objects and texts I put before my daughters to view, listen, and read?”
“Most of what I heard growing up was bootleg recordings made at their shows. The tapes were dubbed a thousand times, and traded from person to person. The sound quality was awful and I don’t even know how much of the music I could actually hear, but what moves me is the idea of the band playing in the moment and the audience embracing all of the imperfection.”
