Can You Stop Your Mother From Singing

She Had Always Been A Reader… But Now She Was Obsessed. Since Her Discovery Of The Book Hoard Downstairs From Her Job, She’d Been Caught Up In One Such Collection Of People And Their Doings After The Next…the Pleasure Of This Sort Of Life – Bookish, She Supposed It Might Be Called, A Reading Life – Had Made Her Isolation Into A Rich And Even Subversive Thing. She Inhabited One Consoling Or Horrifying Persona After Another…that She Was Childless And Husbandless And Poor Meant Less Once She Picked Up A Book. Her Mistakes Disappeared Into It. She Lived With An Invented Force.

I Got Well By Talking. Death Could Not Get A Word In Edgewise, Grew Discouraged, And Traveled On.

Now I'm Sixty-one... Sixty-two, Pretty Soon. It's A Really Interesting Age. Now We Have Women Of Your Age, And Coming Up, And All These Fantastic Writers, Who Have Managed To Have Their Children But Continue With Their Art, Their Work. I Think Women Are Doing The Most Interesting Writing Right Now, The Most Interesting Art. I See Everything Through This Lens, Of Women Finally Taking Their Place In The World. Their True Place. And It's Very, Very Exciting To Me.

[on Her And Husband Michael Dorris:] We Both Have Title Collections. I Think A Title Is Like A Magnet. It Begins To Draw These Scraps Of Experience Or Conversation Or Memory To It. Eventually, It Collects A Book.

Things Which Do Not Grow And Change Are Dead Things.