“When a woman loses her resolve to speak up and stand firmly behind her position, she may be vulnerable to depression, anxiety, headaches, chronic anger, and bitterness. Sometimes these symptoms reflect an unconscious search for truth, forcing a more honest self-appraisal, including the degree to which she is voicing her authentic values and desires and living in accord with them. As writer Kat Duff puts it, “Sometimes I think we would lose ourselves altogether if it were not for our stubborn, irrepressible symptoms, calling us, requiring us, to recollect ourselves, to reorient ourselves to life.” We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent, to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises “life.” But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.”

“It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness. But craziness is very important, and it saves trashy stuff like Magnificent Obsession. This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”