The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.

Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.

When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.

Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.

Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced 20 years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world. Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together.

I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women... if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him.

It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.

It's hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there's nothing to work with.

She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.

He wore a delicate ring with a tiny sleepy diamond embedded in the latticed gold band. He said, "My wife chose this wedding ring for me. It's Victorian, not really my style, but it reminds me of her." And then he said, "My wife crashed the car again." Ah, I thought, as we walked past the golden trees, she does not have a name. She is a wife. I wondered why my male colleague often forgot the names of most of the women he met at social events. He would always refer to them as someone's wife or girlfriend, as if that was all I needed to know. If we don't have names, who are we?

Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection’.

To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else's well-being. This task is still mostly perceived as women's work. Consequently, there are all kinds of words used to belittle this huge endeavour.

The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering) that has made some women go mad.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized. I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.

After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark - she said that she gave herself permission to speak 'in a sense totally alien to women'. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.

It was a big release from the terror of death to finally acknowledge that it is also always absurd.

You get tragedy when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.

The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life...

He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.

I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist.