parasol reviews

“If I was “free,” as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.”

Throughout the whole long friendship, I’m always afraid of revealing myself to Ruth. I’m afraid that she’ll discover how I really am. I make myself into her echo because I love her and because she’s the strongest, but deep inside I am still me. I have my dreams about a future beyond the street, but Ruth is intimately tied to it and will never be torn away from it. I feel as if I’m deceiving her by pretending that we’re of the same blood. In a mysterious way I am indebted to her; together with fear and a vague guilty feeling, this burdens my heart and colors our relationship in the same way it will color all close and lasting relationships later in my life.