I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.
Heather O'NeillSuddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.
Heather O'NeillIn Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect
Heather O'NeillSometimes when you are standing still and itโs snowing, you think that you hear music. You canโt tell where itโs coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we canโt hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat.
Heather O'Neill