A Quote by Joanna Murray-Smith

Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the very end of this volume, in conjunction with her finding and marrying her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon. In this sense, it is half a memoir, the private background story to the public future. (...) The reader is forced to re-evaluate the spectacular weirdness of Weldon's fiction: having lived such a life any other kind would seem insipid.

Joanna Murray-Smith

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Any Auto Background Became Conjunction Creative End Essentially Evaluate Fiction Finding Forced Future Half Having Her Husband Insipid Kind Later Life Lived Marrying Marrying Her Memoir Only Other Private Public Reader Reveals Ron Seem Sense Sensibility Spectacular Story Tide Very Volume Weirdness Would Writer Years

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Joanna Murray-Smith
Australian - Novelist
Born: April 17, 1962

The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries.

Lidia Yuknavitch

I read more and more and I came across this character, Caroline Weldon. Sometimes in history, you find these people that no one would dare create. They're too mad.

Steven Knight

Five of my father's seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies - David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton - carved out successful engineering careers at Langley.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Queen Victoria was a woman of peerless common sense; her common sense, which is a rare gift at any time, amounted to genius. She had been brought up by her mother with the utmost simplicity, and she retained it to the end, and conducted her public and private life alike by that infallible guide.

E. F. Benson

Memory, faith, and the natural world as both witness to the cycle of human life and healer to a questioning heart are at the core of this lovely and lyrical collection of poems. The weather changes, people come and go from cities and towns, babies are born, grow up and depart from their parents’ arms, but still, the countryside and its rituals sustain the people and creatures who know how to read the signs of the seasons. In these pages, Laura Grace Weldon shares those signs with us; her poems are the fruit of a wonderful harvest.

Eleanor Lerman

I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.

Annette Bening

I wish I'd walked out of 'The Tourist' with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. I said to the missus after two minutes, 'He's her husband.' An hour and a half's worth of nonsense later, the big twist at the end is... he's her husband.

Andrew Flintoff

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

Rachel Cusk

I know also another man who married a widow with several children; and when one of the girls had grown into her teens he insisted on marrying her also, having first by some means won her affections. The mother, however, was much opposed to this marriage, and finally gave up her husband entirely to her daughter; and to this very day the daughter bears children to her stepfather, living as wife in the same house with her mother!

T. B. H. Stenhouse

Women is out because she's getting in her daily dose of empowerment, freedom and fearlessness. She has put on her freedom wings for 20 minutes or two hours. That's going to make her whole day right and her whole future hold up and seem entirely possible. The sense of her not having any limits, or any restrictions, to me, is so liberating. She doesn't have to prove anything.

Kathrine Switzer

There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Oscar Wilde

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

Junot Diaz

The only time the private parts of someone's life are relevant is when they're affecting public performance. And just because someone is a public person doesn't mean that any part of his or her private life is open to scrutiny. If someone is doing his or her job, you have to have enough empathy to understand that we all have personal problems.

Rudy Giuliani

My mother ... had a very deep inner spirituality that allowed her to rebuild her life. It's extraordinary that she had such a strong sense of self and such a commitment to the future and such a strong creative sense that she could build new worlds for herself and for us out of the total devastation in her life.

Caroline Kennedy

I have a mother who never took no for an answer when it came to her creative pursuits. She started a hair salon in her spare bedroom and four years later had 30 employees.

Solange Knowles

I now realize Melania is not a normal woman. Two women had described having sex with her husband on national TV in graphic detail in the same week. Her private response: It's politics.' Her public response: dead silence. It just wasn't a human reaction.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff

A Quote by Joanna Murray-Smith

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