I don't make a lot of money, but I get to have freedom.
Great sadness can be off putting, hard to comprehend, especially if it hasn't been your experience. It's amazing for me to know now that AIDS, for instance, is something a lot of people don't "get," whereas it entirely shaped my social life since the time I was twenty until I was almost forty.
I think it's cultural racism more than anything, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking.
I had to re-write "Philosophy" a lot. It was more obscure than what's in the book now, even! Some things I had to go back to and excise my former self, who was even more dense. I think you should teach whatever you want, Brian! That's the point of books like White Girls, to help free our thoughts!
I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.
I really don't think we should dismiss a book because we feel messed about intellectually. Or emotionally. That's the writer's job!
I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.
I feel like there are so few girls in New York like that anymore, who are not focused on getting a man with money.
