I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others – a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
When you seek out – or seek to avoid – your own reflection, the modern city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reflective walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a cacophony of different versions of you – this one too short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color you’ve never seen before. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
I don’t really buy the death-drive thing too literally; it feels overly neat and convenient. But I am suspicious of fighting back being the dominant model for cinematic conflict and personal conflict and political conflict. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went into and out of it, and as I grew up, I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
We talk about characters in literature as though they were built on the model of the real person, but then I often think that the way we present ourselves as real people is based heavily on the way literary psychologies are stylized, and I wonder how the two forms of realistic personhood feed on or fulfill each other. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
Remembering who I am is a really active task for me. And I often have to tell myself, ‘You’re a graduate student,’ ‘You’re a daughter,’ et cetera, in situations where I’m supposed to behave like one. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
I’ is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it’s also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it’s a chute into empathy. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
A lot of the surreal writing that I love is really dreamlike. Like Murakami. He uses the real world, and it’s pretty recognizable, but its populated by these strange visitors, or it has these underground spaces. I was always really compelled by that. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
You have to find some way of engaging with the world around you, however it’s constituted. The engagement is necessarily going to be flawed. But if you do it on your own terms, you’ll be able to extract some pleasure from the world. It might even make you really happy sometimes. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
We’re living at this funny time, where we’re all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It’s easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
