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For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Alix Kates Shulman
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: August 17
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Parent
Unfinished
Business
Dealt
Many
Sheer
Relations
Decades
Guilt
Relation
Constituted
Parents
Avoidance
More quotes by Alix Kates Shulman
For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.
Alix Kates Shulman
There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.
Alix Kates Shulman
One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.
Alix Kates Shulman
Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.
Alix Kates Shulman
When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.
Alix Kates Shulman
I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.
Alix Kates Shulman
I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.
Alix Kates Shulman
My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else's eyes.
Alix Kates Shulman
Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.
Alix Kates Shulman
Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
Alix Kates Shulman
I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.
Alix Kates Shulman
In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.
Alix Kates Shulman
Many people spend the ends of their lives alone, and probably a lot of years in the middle of their lives, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to experience the rewards of solitude.
Alix Kates Shulman
Everything is connected. There is no such thing as an island, especially in our world, global village, the whole thing. Pollution from way across the ocean circulates in the air.
Alix Kates Shulman
When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
Alix Kates Shulman
People often say to me now, Your work changed my life. I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.
Alix Kates Shulman
I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up.
Alix Kates Shulman
Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
Alix Kates Shulman
I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.
Alix Kates Shulman
It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.
Alix Kates Shulman
