My Mother, Literature, and a Life Split Neatly into Two Halves — Vocabulary
Kaye Gibbons
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And if death, and sorrow, and the inexplicable joy that comes from triumph over death and sorrow, if these themes are predominant in my work, past and future, it is because they dominate my memory.

Even as I spent bizarre amounts of time scrutinizing a poem I've said to myself, "This is not normal, this may be a little freakish."†

And I feel pretty safe saying that I rarely read anything for pleasure, although I've derived what I could call pure ecstasy obsessing over lines from T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins, my little Oxford English Dictionary, magnifying glass in hand, hellbent on getting at that one true meaning.†

However, somewhere between ages sixteen and nineteen I realized that most lawyers never meet even one man falsely accused of some heinous crime and that many of the more mundane legal tasks require about as much imagination as testing a streptococcus culture.†

And if death, and sorrow, and the inexplicable joy that comes from triumph over death and sorrow, if these themes are predominant in my work, past and future, it is because they dominate my memory.

But nonetheless, I think it began ' with her.†

But that feeling of separateness abates, it must, when one is in labor, crying, then screaming, then laughing, and then hearing some other woman doing the same.†

He might've been amused with a place that was yet to feel the trickle-down effects of such notions as civil rights, evolution, and women's liberation, but I was not.†

I'd stand in the living room and sing all the show tunes with vigor, doing the best I could with unfamiliar words and phrases, as with the Green Acres song: I just adore the pink house fumes....Keith Manhattan just gave me Park Avenue.†

Mine was Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, and I surprised even myself with the passion of my performance.†

Perhaps writing is an attempt at mitigating that early frustration.†

Like writers I love and who have kept me company through my life, I paid them when I was a child who felt separate and apart; when I learned to see the place I was in as an observer and, as much as I hate to admit it, as one who was intrinsically wrapped up in the seasons on that farm, that heat and poverty, and that sad certainty that life would not be any other way.†

If I had not known that strength, that pure perseverance, I could not have become a writer.†

Mine was Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, and I surprised even myself with the passion of my performance.†

She was lighting the pilot light in the oven when they announced John F. Kennedy was dead, and she sat right down on the kitchen floor and cried.†

By the time I was sixteen I'd decided that the rapid accumulation of as much wealth as possible was far more important than laboratory science, so I chose the law as my life's work.†1 more

If I had not met and married my husband, I have 132 every reason to believe I'd still be wandering around a campus somewhere, collecting incompletes, growing more and more reluctant to acknowledge the line between art and reality.†

She never recited poetry to me as she brushed and braided my hair.†1 more

Even as I spent bizarre amounts of time scrutinizing a poem I've said to myself, "This is not normal, this may be a little freakish."†

That goal was no doubt a reaction to the chaos that swirled in my home after my mother's death.†