Jesteśmy społecznością, która kocha książki

I was too late for those Seventies consciousness-raising groups, where women went round in the circle, telling their stories and being listened to. If I ever tried to take Scarlett to such a group, she'd be bored out of her mind and probably cause a riot, but sometimes I think she and Melanie and Greer and Isadora and Mira are my group, my circle. They helped me, anyway, see that part of being able to, as Nora Ephron so brilliantly put it, "be the heroine of your life, not the victim" is not allowing anyone else to define you, which means coming up with your own definition. Which means knowing yourself. As Melanie does and Scarlett doesn't: that's her sorrow.

Being single would mean taking responsibility for enjoying myself, not waiting to be entertained, or trying to live my life by entertaining someone else.

I wasn't just reading about my heroines, I was reading the story of my life.

I wanted to imagine and I didn't want to stop. Sometimes I think I become a writer so I would never stop.

I wonder if writing Lizzie gave her the guts to reject those two wrong proposals. I wonder if Lizzie made her brave.

All reading are provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the time.

My heroine doesn't work in the first draft or the second and I'm wondering if she ever will. And than I think, I must be writing her because I need her, and if I need her, someone else will too.

It's quite an achievement to make even scones subversive.

Scheherezade is telling stories with a gun to her head. She's like a souped-up Esther. No fainting and fasting for her; Scheherezade becomes a heroine by fictioneering. And while Esther saves the Jaws, Scheherezade saves her people too; her people are the women. She says she's doing it to saves herself and her sisters. And she doesn't just mean her actual sister Dunyazad. She uses the plural; she means all the women who would otherwise be forced into marriage and then murdered. And she menages it. She saves them, she saves herself and becomes queen.

I felt let down when I could see the writer too much at work on a character because it reminded me forcefully that of course I don't have a writer working on my story, guiding me to safety, bending the laws of reality for me, bringing in a hero to rescue me or transporting me to a happier life by the stroke of her pen. No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstanding and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending.
And then I realise I am the writer.
I don't mean because I write. I mean because we all write our own lives. Scheherezade's greatest piece of storytelling is not the stories she tells, but the story she lives.

As a girl, I had thought of myself as being, like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", "in training for a heroine", an activity I thought both important and worthwhile. I had read to find out what kind of woman I might want to be, lived through my heroines, and rehearsed lives I might live.

My family would not have been happy to know I was dating a Muslim. Which was ironic, because it was the first time I'd gone out with someone who spoke the language of my childhood and it was unbelievable intimate. I felt as if my previous relationship had been lost in translation. He felt like home.