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BLVR: I want to ask you about the idea of the “extreme or doomed commitment.” You have a line in The White Album where you say, “I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic,” believing “that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments.”
JD: Right.
BLVR: I wonder if you consider marriage or motherhood, or even writing—
JD: I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
BLVR: And having experienced motherhood and marriage, do you still see them as extreme and doomed commitments?
JD: No, I don’t. I mean, not—I don’t. I see them as, well, certainly they were for me a kind of salvation.
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this is beautiful. particularly since she’s saying this after having lost her husband and her daughter…on the other side of loss, the doom is less terrifying and the salvation is visible.
