Kate Zambreno: For years I lived rather medicated and muted

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."

Kate Zambreno

greatness girl writing

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

Kate Zambreno

ifs book thinking

She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.

Kate Zambreno

lonely light hands

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.

Kate Zambreno

keys writing thinking

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

Kate Zambreno

canon memoir thinking

I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.

Kate Zambreno

character book thinking

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.

Kate Zambreno

reviews males

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

Kate Zambreno

literature men thinking

I am worthy of being read. I mean, one has to be convinced of one's genius.

Kate Zambreno

worthy genius mean

The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.

Kate Zambreno

groups girl men

Patriarchy is having the power to name.

Kate Zambreno

patriarchy names

I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.

Kate Zambreno

nerves genius thinking

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

Kate Zambreno

teaching practice writing

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

Kate Zambreno

female form literature

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

Kate Zambreno

mainstream nonfiction criticism

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

Kate Zambreno

childhood reason remember

One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.

Kate Zambreno

girl writing past

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

Kate Zambreno

class mean people

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.

Kate Zambreno

imperfection literature writing

How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.

Kate Zambreno

doctors creative men

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.