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The fact that other independent businesses are feeling the squeeze as well if youre interested the deepening your under owing tonights subject, and in supporting our wonderful partners, may i politely suggest you wouldoo the buy the book button rather than relying on the local retail behemoth that used to sell books and now sells you corn or katy is as awe their and journalist whose work appeared across the spectrum in digital and an log present from the New York Times to weapons weapons, harpers, the slate and tin house. An he says in the anthology 30 wives looking at hilary, reflectionsly women rited and known the morning after, text, fear and effect system from 1994. 1997s last nugget in paradise. Who blockers exploring the life of writers, and [loss of audio] essay collection in praise of messy lives from 2012. Prefer at nyus arthur [loss of audio] thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here. I was very sad not to come to seattle in person, but happy to be sort of in seattle. And im going to talk a little bit and read at built about my few book, the power notebook, very strange book and when people ask me what its about, its almost hard for me to answer that question. Its about addiction, its about angry men, its about not knowing how to drive, its about eye digit horton d edith horton, its falling holding a new born baby wearing high heel. Its about asking for moore now in a job, its about being a single mother, and being on your own, and its about jean reeves and about simone de its hard to pin it down. And i actually feel like its called the power notebook but i honestly feel about this book, and i think its a little pathological, i feel the book my publisher kind of broke into my house the middle hoff the night and stole my actual notebooks and published them. I sometimes feel that way. Even though thats not exactly what happened. And the notebooks were very hart to write and they were so hard to write for various reasons that will probably become clear to you in the course of my talking about them. They were so hard to write i would only be able to work on them at 30 in the morning so i would wake up every day at 4 30 in the morning when he world was quiet and no one was up and i could trick myself into thinking was like alone on planet earth, and it was only in those hours that i was able to write them for whatever reason. And theyre written the a very different way than anything ive ever done before. Always written things that take a strong argument or sort of more hellish kind of scholarly work, or essays that are take a sort of confident form, and so publishing the net books was a could note bocks was a kind of perverse act in certain ways. The heart of them, they are inspired by two things. One of them i dont know if you can see it here. This is a photograph of simone, very famous forecast taken in 1950 by the photographer, art shaye, and as you can see she is in her 40s, she is getting ready in the bathroom, wearing very high heels, i dont know if you see them. Putting up her hair, and somehow the this photograph is always obsessed me and its the cricks of it the fact she is wearing heels but is naked. She wasnt really she didnt technically give her permission for this photograph but she did live the doctor open with this strange man who was the photographer kind of sitting right there. And he says, he heard the clicking and she was kind of like gnawingy naughty boy and she didnt care. You see in the photograph her not caring that the world is seeing her in this intimate moment and thats what sort of projected there, and the two thing that inspired the become from that photograph are both the idea that maybe its okay to at a certain point in your life to sort of show yourself in that kind of intimate unguarded moment, like the real self, the real you. And that was one thing but the photograph. And the other thing but the photograph that interests me is something that simone herself was interested in which is kind of showing women in all their contradictions, the kind of weird, jarring, facets, like putting her hear up and wear heels but is naked. Shes a brilliant feminist, intellectual but just like a woman getting ready in a mirror, and all of that kind of contradiction that goes interest being a self kind of interested me in this book. And so the second thing that inspired the book, also related to simone one of her biographers asked her, talk about her relationship with john paul and she was very they had an open relationship, very tormented. She was extremely on doctor obsessed with him and they that this open relationship and she basically wanted more of him than he wanted of her. She was sort of an equal relationship and would write him a letter saying without you i am mutilated. She felt she said her relationship with him was her greatest achievement, which irks a lot of people because she was such a Brilliant Writer and philosopher. So her biographer asked her, what would you say to funnel nists who say your relationship was at odds with your feminist theory and he locked at her and said, well, im sorry to disappoint the feminists, but i just dont give a damn. I live how i want and its too bad so many of them live in theory and not in real life. I found that quote so interesting. Maybe that concept of disappointing the feminist partly because i mishaves disappointed the feminist for many decade but also the idea that of that gap between theory and life. That you could be somebody who lived a sort of subject jug gated yourself in your relationship to a map and also this incredibly paul person powerful person in your work and life and intellectual achievements and that paradox is at the heart of this book, which really obsesses a lot over the questions of how i look at my own life very frankly in this book how sometimes you are strong and successful and sometimes youre not. And simone in her work, she says at one point, i wanted to write about women as they really are, as divided human beings, not as they ought to be. And i kind of am interested in that question of just those contradictions or the paradoxes in our relation to power. And so that was kind of those were the sort of nexus of intellectual ideas over at the heart of this very strange project i embarked on. Maybe ill just read at bit now to get a sense of it. Its written at notebooks and some are shorter than others but recall as if theyre kind of notebook entries. Im sort of working out these issues for myself. First is called catastrophe. Francois talking to a friend at the beginning of her relationship with acosta, your headed for a catastrophe, she said. I told her she was probably right. But i felt it was the kind of catastrophe i didnt want to avoid. This one is called emily. My sister emily once said to me, there is no man anywhere so psychotic so drunk, so helpless, to proudal, so indifferent, even just so annoying, that some woman somewhere isnt dying to take care of him. And this one is called the fall. And it is about me one of the one about single motherhood. My daughter violet is six and i had my son on my own and he is very tiny in this story, maybe few weeks old. One morning im walking violet to school. She is pushing the stroller but im carrying the baby because he is fussing. Im wear wink suede three and a half inch platforms. I have work meeting afterwards mitchell feel gets caught in the sidewalk ski lose my balance and fall forward, somehow managing to put both my arms up and cut my hands around the babys head so my legs and arms are badly scraped and bruised by the baby is untouched. He is crying, but only out of outrage at such a sudden and undying any identified change of position undying any identified change of position. Of course a drought gathered, woman carrying a new born has fallen and is bleeding. Violet was beyond mortified and people are not leaving us alone if. She is trying to stand a littleway from us so she wont be associated with us, but being six with only limited success. I try to respond politely to the concern while also trying to get away from the people so violet can stop dying of embarrass. She is right to be angry. I wore the heels the same way i wore stilettos to parties when im nine month progressant ask thats time it endangered of the baby who she thinks of as hers. I tell this story as a wade of hiding or imagine instincts insf hide motherhood. Er in telephone i it as a story how reckless or selfish i am, and how these various roles im trying to play are fundamentally not conducive to staying upright on earth. I see myself suddenly from the perspective of one of the women rushing to work who stop on the streets, vain, anxious, overcaffeinate, narcissistic, unable to give up men looking at her on the street for the first fie months of babys life, trying to hood, trying too flagrantly, clinging too tenaciously to the most hack any red indicator of female sexual power. Think not for the first time, why aim allowed to have this baby . I would not at this point be entirely suppliedes if someone in a uniform came and took him away. A couple of months earlier one officer my male colleagues swung by my office, noticing was visibly pregnant with no man in my life him said, wow, you really do what youre want i laughed of course but the comment stayed with me. The admiration but also the warning undertone thats was getting away with something you usually cant get away with. Being a sexual free agent and having a baby. As if i were shoplifting the baby. Getting him for free. Violet goes right to the heart of it. Why are you wearing those shoes . At six, she wears exclusively sports clothes, soccer jerseys and smokeres. She has not missed the sea of broken mothers in sneakers and bali slaps which in particular seem to telegraph a shimmering apex of female serenity i will never attain and im not at 8 2s schwin. Quoter women with more pride than libido do not see a quote, you only begin to [loss of audio] and your appearance when you get a bit older. A whole dimension of life slides away and you realize in fact you have been using to get attention has been what you look like. Realist a most fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all. The true power must be in not caring how you look when you have slept maybe three hours but i am seduced by surfaces, by habit, by the mysteriously lingering imperative to be recognize by me. The baby is fine, thank god, but he wont always be. Or could so easily not have been. The bruises to declare. Thes in festive yellow, green, mauve. This next section then is about violet again. Shes now in this section 14. So its many years later. And this section is called how to ride the subway. My daughter is taller now than i am. She is 59, wears cutoff shorts and white sneaker width gold stars. Even though she is 14 men start to follow her down the detroit call to her from cars to talk to her as shes coming up this he steps to our house. She writes an assignment for class, quote, puture experbe aware of surrounding, stand alone but close never to boom youre not totally otherwise rated. Move away from those creepy men who watch and talk pout you and make sure to adjust your shirt so it down show any skin. Actually put your sweatshirt on. That will help. And, yes you might want to switch cards when you feel uncomfortable, youre fine, just dont make eye contact. Remember when the drunk man asked you to come over and sit next to him and hull when you didnt he cursed until you could leave the car and think to yourself it could be worse. Dont tell your mom about these men. Once he gets around to showing me this the obvious comes as a shock. The dune offering her power over men is simultaneous with her growing vulnerability. She experiences both so violently at once. She discovers her power to attract men as a burden, a danger, it arrives already fraught. Simone describing this stage, quote, mens gazes flatter and hurt her at the same time. She feels herself at risk in her alienated flesh. Her power is itself a threat, so much of a threat that she is already writing howto guides on protecting yourself from it. The line for girls i razor then. Thin. You have to be confident but not too confident. I noticed girls her age say she is really feeling herself about a girl who seems to exuberantly confident, too interest herself, quote, she is really gassing herself. The irony of these phrases is a cover for an elaborate and variously articulated contempt. They are dedelineating a taboo. At times, at that age, almost feels like the secret police will come in the middle of the night and take you away if you are standing out in this way. If you are feeling yourself. In the lonely crowd David Reisman quotes an interview with a 12yearold girl, hey, i like superman bert than the others because they cant do everything superman can do. That man cant fly and that is very important. Would you like to be able to fly a i would like to be able to fly if everybody else did put otherwise it would be kind of con conspicuous. So before i read the last entry of the note book, i just want to talk a little bit about the form of the notebook and why i chose it because while i guess because its so strange to kind of write in these little pieces and fragments and try to work things out in that way. The reason i chose it is partly bus ive always written notebooks since i was 12 years old. And so for me its kind of a common way of processing the world and in my scholarship i have a ph. D in literature and written some books that very researched kind of biographical book. I love reading peoples notebooked. Its a thrill to sit in a lie area and read through someones notebook, susan sontag 0, whoever, and ive always liked the intimacy of them. But what i real where wanted to get across the note books was the unfinishedness. The idea of the rawness of them, of somebodys thoughts where they have not actually put the together into a polished thing, and for me it is very hard not to try to i have like a kind of orderly mind so i want to resolve contradictions or i want to work things out, and i want everything to be neat and linear and so this back is much more like the way the notebooks work because its fragmented. More like a jigsaw puzzle. Start with this mystery or bee willedderring questions bewildering questions and lay out the pieces and hopefully at the end you can see the picture. Its a much different way of thinking and i wanted to kind of force myself into this very for me very uncomfortable territory of letting myself have these contradictions and kind of choosing a form, the notebook form, which embodies because its notes, you can good off on a tangent go in one direction, you can explore one thing, and then at another point in the noteback in another mood, you explore it in a very different way. So, for me the form itself was an effort to do that, to kind of encompass the way we really think about these questions which is so much more complicated than the sort of easier political ways we like to think about them. And so the form itself was meant to create that sense of, like, my mind, like working through these contradictions or these strange vignettes or moments or little tiny power struggles, or as in this section i just read the question of do we why do we resent powerful women, you howe do girls grow up learning to hide their power in various ways. So these are the kind of questions that i wanted to write but but i didnt want to write in big generalizations like all women are this. Wanted to examine them in these little pieces. And so thats why i chose the notebook form. And incorporating the biography of these women, this section on sill very ya platt which ill sylvia platt which ill read now. Quote, i am aware of a coward disin myself, wanting to give up. If i could study, read, enjoy people on my own, teds leaving would be hard but manageable; quote, how can i live without him . I mean if i could write and garden and be happy with my babies i could survive. But i am so sick and sleepless and jumpy, always a mess. In the years before he leaves her the letters obsess over their her dream of a perfect artistic domesticity. How she she to its. When you send two pairs pairs of dwight ab tigs, when be paint the floors, win we borrow a heat, you send me tollhouse chocolate more sellses when, when we sell poems when aget a sewing machine, when we get a husband the country, when we get a flat in london, he looms over all of this brilliant, dangerous, sexual happiness, the only man she cannot boss. He takes her steak and mushrooms and a glass of red wine in bed when she recover from the strain of her exam. The letters she writes to her american psychiatrist shock me. Its early july 1962. She just discovered the hard fact that ted is cheating on her with an exotic working woman who works in and rent it their flat inch those first createssed leader she is trying solve the problem of herself. How can she change to accommodate him . Moment of trying to hold on to this consuming love before she seize it is over, the letters are darting, the stress, wild. How can i make these women unnecessary to him and keep up my own sense of seductiveness and womanly power . I dont want to be sorrowful are bet, men hate. That what can die . Quote, can you suggest a gracious procedure when you see little tart is after your husband as a party. She leads him it to, engage a hotel room, smile and vanish, smile and stand by, what i dont want to be is stern and disapproving or teary but im only human. Quote, i am by the way not fat. This feels familiar. Also, repellent. How can i solve the problem of myself so he wants to stay . She writes, quote, other men seem ants compared to him. Im physically attract to the no one else. All the complexities complexitil