As soon as I write something on the page, it’s separate from me. I want things to sound like a diary and to sound confessional, but they’re also not real and full of lies.
“When I’m writing I want only to be at my desk. Whatever is sitting there feels fragile and fugitive. I worry that if I so much as turn my back, there will be a code blue. Moreover, I’m living inside those pages, in another reality altogether, which means I’m wholly useless at anything else. For at least a few years, you are a displaced person, holding off one world for the sake of another. And then there is the problem of lunch, in which the writer’s day craters.”
Stacy Schiff