Welcome to Litsy!

“Because of the mythical lothario conjured up in Nin‘s journals, I‘ve always fantasized about having an affair with Henry Miller, horn dog Henry Miller, who can‘t keep his hands off me, who will back me over a couch and go at me, who will fuck me so I stay fucked.”

“Anytime a woman documents the indignities of withstanding a misogynistic world, there are a dozen bench-warmers at the ready to charge her with wallowing, with perpetuating a cycle or psychology of victimhood, with the cynical glamorization of her own suffering. In short, of making a scene. Of being pathetic. Haven‘t we gone far enough? Why can‘t we just shut the fuck up? It‘s all more silencing.”

“For years the myth of Philomela hung over me. The tongue stump. That soundless scream. A formal revolution in testimonial utterance. At the time I first encountered Heroines I was meant to be writing a dissertation on confessional poetry and women‘s projects of self-making, mainly Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, two ‘poetesses‘ you should never admire publicly if you wish to be taken seriously. (In any case I wasn‘t. Taken seriously that is.) -

For lovers of modernist women authors, wannabe women writers, those who followed alt lit blogs of the early ‘10s, “toxic girls,” and/or those who feel or act or are simple too much. Zambreno‘s work is memoir, acidic feminist critique, literary analysis and biography, and rallying cry.

“Who is fair? What is fair? Who gets to judge?”

Liz Phair: "Do you want to be a #polyesterbride? ... Do you want to flap your wings and fly away from here?"

Kate Zambreno: "What to make of this disappearance or willful destruction of these archives of these wives?"

Part memoir, part literary/cultural criticism, Zambreno looks at women writers & artists, the role of Wife & the desire to create, & being made to take second place to their well-known, genius-artist husbands. #FierceFeb @Cinfhen

"This book is also for the girls who still seem, as they did in Virginia Woolf's time, so fearfully depressed."

#booksandvinyl hole because this talks about messy women. This book is so hard to explain, part memoir, part history of women writers, part something else plus a dash of urging you to write. I loved this, Yet I also felt its limitations keenly, she's all about the mad wives so not much on lgbqt or woc. Whilst it's about her personal influencers I felt that leaving out these kind of writers whilst screaming fuck the cannon was a bit out of step.

I've started reading this for #womenshistory and I am loving it. She comes up with a term that I am now going to use to describe my favourite kind of reading, obliterature. I've always been drawn to the books by "mad women" Jean Rhys, Plath not realising how pathologised these people were in their day. As soon as I discovered viragos I was hooked, biographies on women who were difficult and wrote out of general history, count me in! A great term

So many #KickassHeroines! I may have to do multiple posts for this one #SeasonsReadings2016

"Out of this narrative will emerge a chalk outline. It is the body of a woman."

My third Zambreno in a year. In this one, Heroines, I love reading about our "ghostly tutors", all these mad, bad and sad women: Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath, Madame Bovary - whether they are fictional or real. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote these words from the asylum in 1930.

Canon actually comes from a Greek word for 'measuring rod'.