As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

"There’s some very interesting stuff that Sontag writes about her mother here, and I was thinking about these diary entries when I was writing Hot Milk . They are some of the least fragmented diary entries; it feels like Sontag has worked them. This is a quote from Sontag: ‘I was mother’s mother,’ she felt ‘that somehow I was author of her happiness’. She felt that it was her job to keep her mother alive for the duration of her own childhood, and that she’d sacrificed her own need ‘to learn and to be dependant’. That’s the thing, children need to be dependant. It’s what makes us feel safe and it’s how we learn about love. Sontag says, ‘I’m afraid of my mother, afraid of her harshness and coldness, and, of course, afraid that she’ll just collapse, fade out on me, never get out of that bed. My ultimate project is to keep her afloat, alive.’ This seemed important to me when I was writing Hot Milk , it gave me a purchase on Rose Papastergiadis in the way that Sontag felt that she had to make herself less in order to keep her mother’s attention and love. Sofia echoes this when she says, ‘I make my day smaller to make her day bigger.’ Sontag writes, ‘I cringed to make myself smaller, to hide more of myself, so I wouldn’t appear threatening to her.’ This was something that I extended and thought about for Sofia."