Home > Author > Miranda Popkey,
1 " That's not true. I did meet both Laura and my ex-husband in graduate school, but they weren't dating. That would be a better story. I am often thinking of the better story because the actual story is so often boring. "
― Miranda Popkey, , Topics of Conversation
2 " And I think I thought that if I said something everyone would notice that I didn't belong. "
3 " Maybe I was becoming hysterical, women are prone to hysterics after all, this is a well-known fact. "
4 " I wasn't raised Catholic but I had somewhere acquired the sensibility. Anyway I imagined it was wrong and that my body would therefore find a way to ensure I didn't get away with it. "
5 " This was mostly true. I didn't intend to make my story all the way up, but I did want, for no important reason, for my story to be unverifiable. "
6 " Look, you're all imagining yourselves . . . as people in some kind of story. "
7 " I do tend to think I'm the smartest person in every room and it doesn't help that lately I have been. "
8 " I know how this sounds; I mean, now I know how it sounds. "
9 " The problem wasn't thinking of myself as the protagonist of a narrative it was that I hadn't figured out the right narrative yet. "
10 " Why is it that people tell me things? I think it is because I like, liked, to drink and I am good at keeping my face quiet. Also because I ask questions. "
11 " These details are hard to remember. Also I may be exaggerating them. Also I may be minimizing them. The difference between the two—for when a memory is retold, its particulars, inevitably, are brightened or muted depending on the arc of the story of which it is a part—a question of, determined by desire. "
12 " This was the reprieve. A way to keep my mind occupied. To distract it from the topic in which it was most interested and which I—here we imagine the I as a whole and the mind as a part, as apart—most wished to avoid. That part being the self and how it was doing. Whether it was doing it right. The self being my self. The avoidance stemming from a fear of self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge—no, you are not doing it right—that provokes not merely guilt but the desire for, the necessity of, reformation. "
13 " Pondering also how tired I was. Of the discrete—as in distinct, as in finite—pleasure I might take in making one last decision and then no more. "
14 " For the record, I don't believe in meditation. I don't believe in crystals or cleanses or cosmic dusts. "
15 " The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention. "
16 " The sitter is my age, a fact about which I feel some guilt. Or, she is the age I still usually imagine myself to be. In fact she is roughly a decade younger. "
