These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.
The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.
This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.
The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.
I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.