Koren Zailckas Quotations

Reading Poe was like a near-death experience, the kind that makes you feel fragile and free in its wake. I felt almost as though I'd scared myself alive.

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

I think when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents.

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

Having a child doesn't make a woman a mother any more than owning a paintbrush makes her Frida Kahlo.

It's no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she's a freak of nature.

In my early to mid-20s, a fear of confrontation made it difficult for me to end relationships in a mature or even quasi-sane way. Instead, I would hang on resentfully, praying that my doomed beau would end things first and spare me the displeasure. To add hindrance to hang-up, the men I chose were usually just as stoic as I was.

I think what I learned in research is that as Americans, we're very distrustful of anger. We're not sure if we should repress it. The idea that anger is supposed to be controlled is American, and we try to keep it out of our homes.

As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions - special, powerful - of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too.