Back to this post.
I just keep thinking about this as a writer and as a (small-time) activist. I want to understand the universal in my specifics and I want to understand when I’m mistakenly extending my experience to other people.
I was thinking on this after I read momartfully’s excellent single mom post:
And I think of it now and then specifically around an essay that was in (I think) the Guardian, which I can’t find anymore and it points out that all the books about motherhood are written by writers, which means that writing mothers dominate the cultural discussion about motherhood, kinda the way the blog world thinks every mommy blogger is writing blithely at home between loads of sparkling laundry. (Watch Punditmom — only partially successfully — try to make this point to the Wall Street Journal.)
I think about how often people have said to me, “YOUR open adoption works that way but you can’t assume ours does.”
I think about that a lot.
I don’t really have a point except that I’m thinking about it and thinking, like I said, about how to express the universal from my specific and I think the only way to do that is to KNOW what’s specific, which isn’t always easy.
I’m filing this under writing because that’s how I’m thinking about it.
I was so frustrated when I read that collection of first-person essays on women and money that they were all about women writers and money in a way that really didn’t make it apply too much to the rest of us regular old women. I do think writing things makes a difference both in how we create ourselves and our realities and how others are influenced by them, but my brain is far too fried to make sense of even this sentence, let alone any more.