Susan Sontag

I am Irene’s [the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés—SS’s lover for a time in Paris in 1957 and then her partner in New York between 1959 and 1963] Maginot Line

Because I don’t understand. I don’t really accept the change in Irene. I think I can reverse it—by explaining, by demonstrating that I am good for her

But it is as indispensable for her to reject me—as it has been indispensable for me to hold on to her.

To write mainly about myself,” she once told an interviewer in The Boston Review, “seems to me a rather indirect route to what I want to write about … I have never been convinced that my tastes, my fortunes and misfortunes have any particularly exemplary character

then living in exile in Pacific Palisades.

an exercise in admiration for the writer my mother had then admired above all others

Any more than she could convince me—when we lived together—not to need her, clutch at her, depend on her.

I don’t really accept the change in Irene. I think I can reverse it—by explaining, by demonstrating that I am good for her

But it is as indispensable for her to reject me—as it has been indispensable for me to hold on to her

There is no responsiveness, no forgiveness in her. To me, only hardness. Deafness. Silence. Even a grunt of assent “violates” her.