To live in a world meant for other people

I first read sections of this book as a child (7 or 8), tricked by its title. At the time I think it is meant for someone like me, pick it from the shelf at a friend's house. I don't understand most of what I read, but I do sense the emotional violence, the extreme tension. It is real. I can feel it. And it comes off the page. A remarkable discovery.  I have since re-read the book many times, seen the movie with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and seen the play on Broadway with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner. It remains my favorite stage play and one of my favorite books in my library.  But nothing stays with me like that first time I pull it off the shelf as a child, get ripped open, exposed to the raw and emotional possibilities of words on the page. If any book has influenced the depths of my writing, this one has. My books on Amazon   |   Subscribe to this site   |   Contac t me   

Nobody's asking you to remember every single goddamn Warner Brother's epic...just one! One single little epic! Bette Davis has peritonitis in the end...she's got this big black fright wig she wears all through the picture and she gets peritonitis, and she's married to Joseph Cotten or something... *** I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up? *** Alright... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny, so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know! *** Martha is 108... years old. She weighs somewhat more than that. *** George is bogged down in the History Department. He’s an old bog in the History Department, that’s what George is. A bog. . . . A fen. . . . A G.D. swamp. Ha, ha, ha, HA! A SWAMP! Hey, swamp! ...