Rachel Kadish
I often begin writing when something is bothering me. Years ago, I was thinking about Virginia Woolf’s question: what if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister?
Woolf’s answer: She died without writing a word.
What, I wondered, would it take for a woman of that era, with that kind of capacious intelligence, not to die without writing a word?
For one thing, she’d have to be a genius at breaking rules.
My novel The Weight of Ink reaches back in time to ask the question: what does it take for a woman not to be defeated when everything around her is telling her to sit down and mind her manners? I started writing with two characters in mind, both women who don’t mind their manners: a contemporary historian named Helen Watt and a seventeenth century Inquisition refugee named Ester Velasquez. It’s been a delight working on their story.
The Weight of Ink is my third novel, but I’ve also written two other novels and one novella, plus a few dozen essays and stories. Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I put words to paper because it's my way of metabolizing life. To paraphrase Henry James: I don't really know what I think until I see what I say.
Thanks for visiting this page, and for your interest in books.
“People misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble. No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it. Q.E.D.: No two happy people are happy in the same way. Even Tolstoy was afraid to admit this, and I don't blame him. Every day brilliant people, people smarter than I, wallow in safe tragedy and pessimism, shying from what really takes guts: recognizing how much courage and labor happiness demands."-Tracy Farber”
“Books. People have no idea how beautiful books are. How they taste on your fingers. How bright everything is when you light it with words.”
“The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market. FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn’t care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around.”
“Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself--or not give yourself--of your free will.”
“Love isn't rest. Love requires you, from time to time, to rip up your soul and replant it. To dare your lover to do the same. To muster sympathy where it seemed impossible. To be, perpetually, two kids joining hands, drawing breath, and deep diving.”