When I write about art

The truth-telling monster

When I write about art, I no longer believe I need to experience something terrible to produce something of worth. There’s a passage in Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence which I always return to remind myself of this:

“when someone feels that the wrong done to them has been unrecognised […] [there’s] a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.”