A Quote by Jill Talbot
It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel like I'm reading someone else's story, and I feel like I've lost something, too, in the writing of self, as if I'm standing and reading myself, as a stranger, to other strangers.
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Reading about myself on public platforms makes me uncomfortable. I don't like it. I read other people's interviews or articles, but when it comes to myself, if I see something about myself then I immediately turn over the page.
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.
Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.
Two kinds of reading can be distinguished. I call them reading like a reader and reading like a writer ... when you read like a reader, you identify with the characters in the story. The story is what you learn about. When you read like a writer, you identify with the author and learn about writing.
When my daughter was born, I was reading a lot of children's books, and there weren't any characters who looked like her. For all the content that's out there, there aren't many African-American protagonists. I looked at it like, if there isn't someone else creating it then I have to do it myself.
The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.
Some instinct has told me I need to live in a world that isn't consumed with reading about myself or anyone else or someone's opinion about something. I need to be clear of that. It's just healthier for me. I feel happier.
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want
to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
I'm trying to start reading books that you gain knowledge from in order to challenge myself more. As a rule, I tend to read easy reading/populist-type books, but I don't feel like I'm learning enough.
If I'm writing with or for someone else, it just has to feel true and real for them. It has to feel like they're being honest. If it's for myself, it's the same thing. It has to be something I can mean when I say it.
I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure.
I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.
If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?
For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.
Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman.
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