Heidi Julavits Quotes
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As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.
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I think there’s a lot of threshold weeping. Like, am I doing this? Am I really wearing this out in the world? My daughter is very much like that. She will put clothes on and her clothes just make her beside herself. They make her so sad sometimes. And you do realize you feel betrayed sometimes by your own clothing. You put something on that usually protects you and makes you OK, and sometimes you’re just not fit for the world and even your best pants can’t overcome that feeling for you.
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I have a daughter who, when younger, possessed no barrier between her emotional self and the outside world. Her emotional insides spilled out all over, and, especially when I was sleep-deprived and probably a little paranoid, this really threatened me. It was as if she were embodying and expressing the insecurities and freaked-outedness I never express, and which I've learned over the years to keep hidden.
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I developed a crazy face rash after I got engaged to a guy I must have known somewhere I should not marry. I hadn't articulated this to myself, so my face told the world instead.
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Maybe the body is taking responsibility where the mind is not. It's scrapbooking for us.
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My husband is always accusing me of being a context-free individual. He asks something and he has no idea where it came from or what it related to. I have to supply him with way more supplementary information than I ever have to supply my female friends.
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You know you're screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.
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I think the one reason that writers marry other writers - one of the reasons that I married another writer - was, I fell in love with that writer. But second of all, I had been married before and a source of marital strife was me needing to go away for a couple of weeks to write or it's Saturday and I think I just need to work today and not hang out with you.
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Our cover has always been really important. For those of you who haven’t seen it Charles Burns, who is a graphic artist, does four portraits, so it’s split into quadrants and there’s four heads, basically—portraits of people. We’ve actually often thought and freaked out, what if something happened to Charles Burns? Because he’s so identified with the cover of our magazine, I don’t know what we would do if anything happened to Charles Burns.
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If, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I'd probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn't see them, no one would know me.
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I don't think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.
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Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, "Who hates me today?"
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I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.
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I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.
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There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.
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I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!
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I wouldn't be myself if I weren't always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.
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If I'd done the discovery before I wrote the book, then there would be nothing to discover. It would feel dutiful instead of exciting.
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Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.
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I like playing with a popular cliché and making it my own by half-embracing it, half-disemboweling it.
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A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.
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I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.
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I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women. Whenever I hang out with my female friends, I feel like context is never needed.
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To believe you're being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you've exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief.