I feel like women bond with other women in this nonverbal way, where they take on each other’s gestures. You start dressing more like each other, you eat the same food… It’s a way of expressing regard: I want to be like you. Which is flattering, but if you view it another way, terrifying. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
I think I may be the most well-adjusted person you’d ever meet who thinks constantly about falling out of her life. And my life is pretty great! It’s not like I don’t know that. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they’ve got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
I feel like things are weirder in our food production chain than I can even make up. I wouldn’t invent pink slime, but pink slime exists: It’s a non-fictional entity. Like, that stuff grosses me out so much, I couldn’t make it up. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
Both my parents are professors, and I never really saw people do any other jobs, so I didn’t really know how to want a different kind of job. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
These days, there are times when my academic thinking intervenes in my writing, but it’s usually while I’m developing a project and not while I’m writing it. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
I went into academia thinking that there’d be constant reciprocity between my scholarship and my creative work but found that doing one always turned my mind into the sort of tool that was badly suited to doing the other. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
When I started binge-watching TV, when that became a thing due to Netflix a few years ago, the first thing I watched was ‘Lost.’ It was summer break from grad school, and I watched it all in a row, like as many hours a day as I could, as though I were clocking in at a job. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
Sometimes I want to withhold judgement on whether something is good or bad, but I do feel like identifying with TV characters – connecting to them emotionally more than you connect to literal, physical people in your life – causes problems. They just don’t have the same existence or boundaries as you do. They resemble us, but they are not us. Alexandra Kleeman Read Quote
