All my life I've made do with less, because 'stuff' makes me anxious. - Vivian Gornick

If a memoir is to achieve literature, it has to have an organizing principle, it has to have an idea, it has to have something that will be of value to the disinterested reader. And that doesn’t happen so often, because most people who are writing memoirs are not writers...The ability to turn yourself into a persona who is able to generate drama, narrative drive, conflict, all the things that are required, is very hard, and not too many people achieve it.

Vast internal changes must occur in women in which old responses, old habits, old emotional convictions are examined under a new light: the light of consciousness.

For many of us the initial feminist understanding came as a kind of explosion: shattering, scattering, everything tumbling about, the old world within splintering even as the new one was collecting. But there were moments of perfect, clarifying calm when the thing, as it were, was "grasped whole." And these moments were there from the very beginning, then lost, then recovered, again lost, again recovered, lurching forward in the unshapely manner of one proceeding through uncharted territory with a compass that works only intermittently.