Janice Erlbaum famous quotes

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Eye #Perfect #Stories

Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Pain #Powerful #Past

Those of us who obsess over every word and action are constantly recalling past events, but that doesn't make them any less painful, nor does it help us transcend them. To write memoir, you have to not only recollect past events, you have to revisit them. You have to get back to the mental and emotional state you were in during those events.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Writing #Past #Emotional

I didn't set out to write a book with no real male characters, but men were not important to my narrator, who was much more interested in maternal and pseudo-maternal love, so they were unimportant to me. I didn't even notice the lack of men in the story until I finished it. But once I did notice it, I was kind of delighted. Apparently, my subconscious is totally sexist.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Real #Book #Writing

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Healing #Past #Events

Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Smart #Moving #Two

I remain an active volunteer in the field of at-risk youth, so I'm pretty familiar with the landscape as it stands now, but I don't have any qualifications or an exhaustive body of research to back up my observations.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Volunteer #Risk #Research

I feel a lot of sympathy for the young women I've written about, including Younger Janice. I think that all of them (me in Girlbomb, Samantha in Have You Found Her, and Elizabeth in I, Liar) had some early family trauma that contributed to their dysfunctional methods of dealing with the world, but I wouldn't call them/myself victims - survivors, maybe, but not victims. Nor do I think of them/myself as con artists.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Liars #Artist #Thinking

Anybody who severs their own Achilles tendon, takes blood thinners to induce a hospital stay , or beats themselves with their fists hurts themselves as much, if not more, than they benefit from the attention they derive from their actions. Con artists usually benefit from misleading others without sacrificing anything themselves. All my girls have sacrificed plenty.
-- Janice Erlbaum

#Girl #Hurt #Sacrifice

Harriet, Hi! Light of my eye! Come to the pictures and have a good cry, For it's jolly old Saturday, Mad-as-a-hatter-day, Nothing-much-matter-day-night!

Sarah took a deep breath and set off along the passageway again. A clump of lichen on the gatepost opened its eyes and watched her go. The eyes, on tendrils, had an anxious look, and when she had gone some distance away the clump, swiveling its eyes toward each other, commenced to gossip among itself. Most of it disapproved of the direction she had taken. You could tell that from the way the eyes looked meaningfully into each other. Lichen knows about directions.

I think it's important to take a break, you know, from the public eye for a while, and give people a chance to miss you. I want longevity. I don't want to get out there and run myself ragged and spread myself thin.

Through the death of Christ on the cross making atonement for sin, we get a perfect standing before God. That is justification, and it puts us, in God's sight, back in Eden before sin entered. God looks upon us and treats us as if we had never sinned.

My idea of the perfect bottom would be nice, bubbly, curvy, firm, maybe a little bit bouncy.

I just graduated from high school, and I was working at Blockbuster. Not only did I get into movies while I was there, but I was putting away boxes and looking at the kids on the covers. It felt like windows into these seemingly perfect lives.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.

It's really a sad story, and I liked that. The songs on this album talk about relationships in every aspect.

I love love stories, no matter how dark.