Bonne fête Joni!

until it sticks:

I look again at Alexandra's face as she sat in the garden and I recall a sentence by Anton Chekhov, who was also a doctor. "The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully... that the reader can no longer evade it."

John Berger
via wood s lot

Margaret Atwood

...what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be ‘“ourselves”? What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time?

Atwood on Eggers at NYRB