Suicide Blonde

Product Information

Image:It strikes me as we’re talking about this that being freed from the rigidity of doctrine and leaning into, as you’re saying, the unknown might also shape the form your writing takes. The form of Flash Count Diary is not linear or traditional. Rail: It’s so great you mentioned your daughter, because I was so interested in the passage in Suicide Blonde where Madam Pig asks Jesse “who told you that you have to do what you don’t want? [...] Your mother?” I don’t have a daughter, but I’ve been obsessed with the idea of having one for a few years now, and I am obsessed with writing about my own mother and her family. The motif of a complicated mother-daughter relationship is so common in literature written by women. It is empowering in the way that writing about female companionship is, in that it creates a semi-separate world where women are exerting such tremendous influence on each other and supporting each other against a greater (usually patriarchal) force or pulling each other down further. Why do you think we write so intensely about these semi-separate worlds and our relationships with our mothers and other women? Darcey Steinke (born April 25, 1962) [1] is an American author and educator. She has written five novels: Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Milk, [2] Easter Everywhere, [3] and Sister Golden Hair. [4] [5] Steinke has also served as a lecturer at Princeton University, [6] the American University of Paris, [7] New School University, [8] Barnard College, the University of Mississippi, [9] and Columbia University. Steinke: I think when I wrote Suicide Blonde , at twenty-eight, I was disappointed in love. We are raised as women to feel like love is going to be this huge thing that will make us completely happy and change our life for the better, forever. From the time we are teenagers romantic love is held up to us as an ideal. We diet, dye our hair, get waxed all so we can fall in love and start our life. Relationships are hard though, and complicated and messy. I was beginning to feel romantic love was bullshit when I wrote Suicide Blonde. Now I’d say love is a lovely thing, but that there is much too much pressure on romantic love for women, it’s seen as more important than anything else, meaningful work, friendships, and I think that’s wrong. It’s like femininity in general, it’s not implicitly bad, but there is just too much pressure on it and not enough other options. The love I am speaking of is love for the world, for the Earth and for all sorts of people, even ones we don’t know. Romantic love is not radical, but the kind of love I am hoping to move into and beam out, is.

a b c "Darcey Steinke". The Media Briefing. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. Since that time, I, myself, experienced a divorce and I saw how, by hard emotional work, it can be ok not just for the children of divorce, but for the partners as well. I mean divorce, as hard as it is, is not a problem, it’s actually a solution to a problem. So I don’t agree with Jesse anymore on this. I think divorce can lead to growth and healing, not only calcified pain. I mean everyone is always coming apart but everyone is also always coming together. Contributor I’ve been reading about the non-face in my upstate cottage. In Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Holiday,” a young writer visits a family of “real old fashion German peasants” deep in Texas farm country. They are a huge multi-generational brood of farmers served by a “crippled, badly deformed servant girl” named Ottilie. A creature who moves in a “limping run” with a “mutilated face” that is so “bowed it is almost hidden.” Midway through the narrative Ottilie pulls the narrator into her small shabby bedroom off the kitchen, to show her a photo of herself at five, before illness ravaged her body. “She patted the picture and her own face, and struggled terrible to speak.” The narrator realizes Ottilie is not a servant but a member of the family, the eldest daughter, treated after her illness with neither love nor kindness. “No one moved aside for her or spoke to her, or even glanced after her when she vanished into the kitchen.” What white people see when they look at you,” James Baldwin told Studs Terkel on his radio show in 1967, “is not visible. What they do see when they look at you is what they have invested you with.”Hallucinatory, dystopian . . . a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion.--- New York Times Also, I wear a hijab so I definitely think twice about writing anything that is particularly descriptive about any part of my body that I don’t show in certain public settings, but even for men or women who don’t wear hijab, I don’t know how I feel (morally/Islamically) about describing or talking about sex or bodies in a way that can—to put it simply, turn people on. “Is that Islamically appropriate, to test people’s hearts that way?” that’s the question I always ask myself. In the Islamic tradition, any sex outside of marriage is considered a sin. So when I say “test people’s hearts,” I really mean “make life harder for people who are not happily married by showing them how great sex and physical intimacy can be?” I do not think sex in itself is shameful—certainly not the desire for it, since one of the greatest gifts God promises the people of heaven in the Islamic tradition is sex and companionship—and a lot of other pleasures that are purely physical. But as a Muslim, I have come to think of the pursuit of pleasures outside of a set of guidelines as sinful. I know that different Christians have different ideas about the pursuit of pleasure (sex or otherwise) both within and without sets of guidelines, but what grounds you personally?

So why is the book called "Jesus Saves"? We don’t know. Jesus is frequently discussed, but he never manifests. However, because we live in southwest Virginia, we would never suggest the title is ironic. That would get us shot. We accept, without question, that Jesus saves. We just wonder when he intends to start. Image: In Flash Count Diary you write, “For decades I’ve tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get out of the way so the force of the universe could use me as a conduit.” I think many artists share this feeling of wanting—and failing—to be channels. In the book, you note that the “breakdown” of your “former identity” during menopause allowed you to feel that you were “making a little progress.” What has that progress looked like for you since you wrote the book? What does it mean to you to get out of your own way as an artist and thinker?An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. Complicating things further is the reality that clergy families are held up as an impossible model, which, as a child, is a difficult responsibility to hold. I remember once—I can’t remember if I was misbehaving, or was being wild—but my dad said, “I wish this wasn’t true, but your behavior affects my job.” Image: I want to ask you another question related to that same desire to see and exist more expansively. In the book you detail your fascination with orca whales, and describe a trip you made to Washington State’s San Juan Islands to see the Southern Resident orcas who live in the Salish Sea. You write, “Whales are like God […] Not seeing them is just as important as seeing them.” You then quote Alan Watts as writing, “Here is the great difficulty […] in passing from the symbol and the idea of God and into God himself. It is that God is pure life, and we are terrified of such life because we cannot hold it or possess it, and we will not know what it will do to us.” How has this not seeing—this recognition of what cannot be held—altered or affected your way of being in the world? Hallucinatory, dystopian . . . a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion."-- New York Times A Wished-For House With a Hideaway Nook". The New York Times. May 13, 2007 . Retrieved July 14, 2012.