Quotes from Koren Zailckas

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

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.

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

I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.

Instead of seeing bad in yourself, you perceive it in others. It's a defense mechanism. One that allows people to go on believing they're perfect.

I'm trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure.

For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me.

I'm finding it takes too much energy to do the things that people do to pass for competent adults.

Violet remembered that slap; later her mother had called it a love tap, as if to further confuse love with pain.

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.

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 when you're 14 years old, I think you're sort of looking for markers that prove you're an adult and you're independent of your parents.

My short stature may have something to do with my tendency to shout when enraged. How else is anyone going to hear me way down here?

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

I've been thinking I'd like to be Daisy; I'd like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

My demeanor isn't that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four "manageable" pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued.