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A review by diana_skelton
On Writers and Writing by Margaret Atwood
4.0
"'The blood jet is poetry,' wrote Sylvia Plath ten days before her own suicide. [...] So much a part of the job description did it appear that after my first two slim volumes had been published I was asked, in all honesty, not whether I was going to commit suicide, but when. Unless you were willing to put your life on the line--or rather, dispose of it altogether--you would not be taken quite seriously as a woman poet. Luckily I wrote fiction as well as poetry. I did feel that prose had a balancing effect. More meat and potatoes on the plate, you could say, and fewer cut off heads."
"I didn't encounter any writing about writers and their writing lives until I'd made it to university and had run headlong into Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promise," originally published in 1938 but reissued in time for me to be frightened by it. It lists the many bad things that can happen to a writer to keep him--him is assumed--from producing his best work. These include not only the practice of journalism--a bloodsucker for sure--but also popular success, getting too involved with political agendas, not having any money, and being a homosexual. About the most effective thing a writer could do to support himself, said Cyril Connolly--both he and I were living then in the age before the proliferation of grants--was to marry a rich woman. There wasn't much hope of this for me, but all other avenues, according to Connolly, were fraught with peril."
"Your Aunt Lila won't speak to you because she thinks she is Madame X, the profligate floozy in your latest novel, and she never did any such thing, and how dare you. Serves you right for filching her finger wave and her 1945 nip-waisted suit, and pasting them onto someone completely different."
"I didn't encounter any writing about writers and their writing lives until I'd made it to university and had run headlong into Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promise," originally published in 1938 but reissued in time for me to be frightened by it. It lists the many bad things that can happen to a writer to keep him--him is assumed--from producing his best work. These include not only the practice of journalism--a bloodsucker for sure--but also popular success, getting too involved with political agendas, not having any money, and being a homosexual. About the most effective thing a writer could do to support himself, said Cyril Connolly--both he and I were living then in the age before the proliferation of grants--was to marry a rich woman. There wasn't much hope of this for me, but all other avenues, according to Connolly, were fraught with peril."
"Your Aunt Lila won't speak to you because she thinks she is Madame X, the profligate floozy in your latest novel, and she never did any such thing, and how dare you. Serves you right for filching her finger wave and her 1945 nip-waisted suit, and pasting them onto someone completely different."