She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

What you get is no longer what you see.

Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.