Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

In never leaving home, Moore found a shortcut in suffering, and she suffered impeccably. “Writing, to me, is entrapped conversation,” she wrote to Ezra Pound when he was in St. Elizabeths Hospital. I resent her for living an unhaunted life. I envy her for her entrapment. I can find no selfishness in her but her selfless art: sane, elegant, uncharitable.

Melodrama is never political. It’s not my responsibility to manipulate the memories of my characters. It is presumptuous of anyone, other than the characters themselves, to label their experience, or to impose meanings upon their memories. Characters who do so have agendas, yet they are not my agenda. My curiosity is to watch how memory, both as melodrama and as controlled narrative, lives on in time. Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally and reliable annihilato

Willfulness is a strange optimist. It turns the inevitable into the desirable. If aloneness is inevitable, I want to believe that aloneness is what I have desired because it is happiness itself. It must be a miscomprehension—though I have been unwilling to give it up—that one’s life could be lived as a series of solitary moments. In between, time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance. That there is an opposite perspective I can only understand theoretically. The time line is also a repetition of one’s lapse into isolation. It’s not others who vanish, but from others one vanishes.