Top 17 Koren Zailckas Quotes

I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward, we withdrew from one another and tried our best to strike the event from our memories.

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I’m told would last for hours. If I couldn’t triumph, I didn’t want to play.

I think what I learned in research is that as Americans, we’re very distrustful of anger. We’re not sure if we should repress it. The idea that anger is supposed to be controlled is American, and we try to keep it out of our homes.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

I would never make up a character who didn’t exist or an event that didn’t transpire. If you’re a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive.

I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity; it’s not very ladylike.

Reading Poe was like a near-death experience, the kind that makes you feel fragile and free in its wake. I felt almost as though I’d scared myself alive.

Why is Kris Jenner a powerhouse? Because some part of us confuses fame and infamy, too. If she really bothered us half as much as we claim she does, we’d look away and stop feeding her empire.

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only ‘friend,’ at least until you’re old enough to go to school.

Since I’ve quit drinking, I’m not sure I’ve found the good life, but I’ve certainly uncovered a better one.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It’s just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

Having a child doesn’t make a woman a mother any more than owning a paintbrush makes her Frida Kahlo.

It’s no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she’s a freak of nature.