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Kate Zambreno Books

Writer

Kate Zambreno is an American writer born in 1977. Her works are known for their unique literary style and profound exploration of female experience.

Heroines

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Drifts

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Book of Mutter

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Feminism Madness Feminist Quotes Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“If you are a woman—the flames are seen as too close. The flames of Virginia Woolf.”

Feminism Feminist Quotes Virginia Woolf

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“She is bleeding Ophelia, not a tortured Hamlet.”

Feminism Feminist Quotes Sylvia Plath

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“If Molly Brown was a real woman writer, she would probably be dismissed as mad and unnecessarily pathologized. We glorify our male literary hysterics who often channel women and condemn our female literary hysterics. They can play women, fetishize her excesses. Make fun of her frivolity. They don't have to be women. A colonizing or appropriating of the feminine.”

Feminism Feminist Quotes

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“My femme fatales, my deadly women, so often left to die.”

Feminism Femme Fatale

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“It's difficult not to read Vivien(ne) as this pathetic spectacle of illness and dependence. The ultimate grotesque of femininity, like Freud's hysteric/housewife (both Dora and her mother). But channeling her, imagining an interior life, I can sense her early inner spirit and see it squelched and doomed into sickness and submission. Under different circumstances and with more strength and less of a mother who crafted her as an invalid from childhood., she could have been an author. Maybe.”

Feminism Mental Health Mental Illness Women Writers

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“In This Sex which is Not One Luce Irigaray asks: "Does Woman have an unconscious or is the unconscious?" She who represents a primitive myth, something of the unrepressed past. Blank, you can project anything onto her.”

Feminism

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“Vivien(ne) is depicted so often as the femme fatale, the black widow, the vampire. Yet Tom seems bolder, more vital, more alive as she declines, Jaunty in top hat and cane outside Faber & Gwyer.”

Femme Fatale Misconceptions T S Eliot

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“The threat of the femme fatale lingering through modernist texts. All the dark ladies of "The Waste Land," wounding the impotent Fisher King. She is an excessive, castrating presence, threatening to sweep the subject up into sudden hysteria. Fitzgerald's baby vamps and society vampires, the fast girl who kisses (the real danger is her mouth, Zelda's mouth was selected in her high school composite of prettiest girl). Mythologizing the lives (wives) that catalyzed them. A DeKooning horror: FEMME. He who immortalized her in leatherbound.”

Femme Fatale

Book:Heroines

Source: Heroines

“Tal vez en esto consista la auténtica soledad. Preocuparse por un gato perdido que ni siquiera sabes si existe. Todos lo anotaron como si hubiera dicho algo profundo.”

No Ficción

Book:Drifts

Source: Drifts

“Pienso en cómo Wittgenstein deseaba silencio en su vida, y como a menudo se retiraba a algún sitio, a una habitación escasamente amueblada, para poder pensar. A veces lo único que necesitaba era una silla en una habitación.”

No Ficción

Book:Drifts

Source: Drifts

“LA MADRE es nuestro lugar de origen. Y cuando desaparece nos quedamos sin hogar. Buscamos otras figuras maternas a las que seguir, como una Rut huérfana deambulando por tierras extrañas para encontrar una madre.”

No Ficción

Book:Book of Mutter

Source: Book of Mutter

“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.”

Writing My Own Fiction Teach Practice Creative Teaching Approach Genre Creative Writing Non Fiction Phds

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.”

“I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!”

Thinking Writing Ideas Different Might Wonderful Publishing Publish

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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."”

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

Ifs Thinking Book

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Firsts Stills Sometimes Hands Light Difficult Rooms Lonely Oneself Cups Delicate Repetition Inhale

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.”

Thinking Helping Courses Crisis Invisible Our Society Existential Getting Old Getting Older Personal Experiences Older Women Existential Crisis

Author:Kate Zambreno

“For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.”

Years Scene Pages Notes Critical Passages Fragments Diaries Notebook Agitation Anecdotes Rant

Author:Kate Zambreno

“My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.”

Writing Important No Money Slim

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability.”

Wells Wish Deals Novel Honest Affair My Favorite Being Honest Lazy Nonfiction Instability

Author:Kate Zambreno

“All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.”

Writing Boring Personal Life Orderly Wildness

Author:Kate Zambreno

“It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.”

Feels Writing Enough Realizing Discipline Stable Partnership Strict

Author:Kate Zambreno

“People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.”

People Thinking Has Beens Reason Taught Stress Trauma

Author:Kate Zambreno

“People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.”

People Literature Economy Concern Concerned Mental Health Gender Ridiculous Health System

Author:Kate Zambreno

“My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.”

Way Has Beens Political Written Roots Rage Alienation

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I am home because I am a writer, but sometimes, when I'm not productive (productivity: the expectations of capitalism), I feel like a terrible housewife, or a sick person.”

Feels Persons Sometimes Home Terrible Expectations Capitalism Sick Productivity Productive Housewife Sick Person

Author:Kate Zambreno

“When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia.”

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.”

Disease Rhetoric Inheritance Exposing Heterosexuality Heterosexuality Is

Author:Kate Zambreno

“I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.”

Thinking Want Wife Mad Routes Mistress

Author:Kate Zambreno

“If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.”

Ifs Writing Oneself Narrative Officials Rhetoric

Author:Kate Zambreno

“On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.”

Whole Biographies

Author:Kate Zambreno

“The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.”

Men Greatness Great Men Excess Biographies

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Men Difficult Creative Dangerous Genius Behavior Aspect Doctors Accepted

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Thinking Genius Nerves Permission

Author:Kate Zambreno

“Patriarchy is having the power to name.”

Names Patriarchy

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Men Way Want Happens Girl Groups Crime Concepts Refuse Shade Status Quo

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Mean Genius Worthy Convinced

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Thinking Men Literature Autobiography Channeling Embargo

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Males Reviews

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Thinking Memoir Canon

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Form Literature Reader Female Memoir Great Literature

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Given Novel Criticism Harder Memoir Nonfiction Mainstream

Author:Kate Zambreno

“With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.”

Ifs Character Fiction Privileged Autobiography Main Characters

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Ifs Thinking Firsts Persons Doe Stills Book Ends Character Female Notes Empowering Privileged First Person Main Characters

Author:Kate Zambreno

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

Reason Remember Felt Childhood Various

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Years Feelings Language Unhappiness Vague

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

Writing Moments Past Girl My Past Passivity

Author:Kate Zambreno

“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.”

People Trying Wells Mean Life Is Pay Class Draws Gender Our Society Psychiatry Tribute

Author:Kate Zambreno

About the Author

Born: 1977
Known for: Writer
Quotes: 54

Books & Sources

HeroinesRelated source material

DriftsRelated source material

Book of MutterRelated source material

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Kate Zambreno Books

Heroines

Drifts

Book of Mutter

Related Quotes