He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs.
Miranda JulyRead
Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote acknowledges Lorrie Moore's influence in creating space for complex, humorous female narrators.
Miranda July reflects on the pioneering work of Lorrie Moore in literature, highlighting how her portrayal of female narrators as funny, complex, and sometimes flawed broke new ground for women writers. This opening of space in storytelling allowed July and many others to explore their own voices, thus enriching the literary landscape with diverse female perspectives.
Themes
WomenNarratorLiteratureHumorComplexity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about women in literature, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of representation.
More from Miranda July
All quotes →We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.
Miranda JulyRead
Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.
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I have female friends who work in all different mediums who I speak to at least once a week. It helps me so much to know that I'm not alone. I think that's the bare minimum you need to sustain yourself - some sort of context of other women making things.
Miranda JulyRead
After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.
Miranda JulyRead
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