Alexandra Kleeman

“I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.”

“There was nothing else I could do but say sorry myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling.”

“These days, there are times when my academic thinking intervenes in my writing, but it's usually while I'm developing a project and not while I'm writing it.”

“Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.”

“I went into academia thinking that there'd be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other.”

“I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.”

“I'm really interested in passivity as a type of action - sort of allowing the situation to change you, choosing to give in being an act of agency rather than an act of submission.”

“Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.”

“Sometimes I want to withhold judgement on whether something is good or bad, but I do feel like identifying with TV characters - connecting to them emotionally more than you connect to literal, physical people in your life - causes problems. They just don't have the same existence or boundaries as you do. They resemble us, but they are not us.”

“I feel like women bond with other women in this nonverbal way, where they take on each other's gestures. You start dressing more like each other, you eat the same food... It's a way of expressing regard: I want to be like you. Which is flattering, but if you view it another way, terrifying.”

“A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it's pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that.”

“But I had no idea who this person might be, or who any of the people might be who sat at that table and watched me at the door and claimed to have feelings not exactly for me, but at me.”