The monologue, the reverie, and in equal measure the fragmented, the interrupted… as in Sarah Ruhl’s ‘On Interruptions’ in which the text is interrupted, left hanging, as – full-blast, mid-sentence, in rushes the child.
Sorry. In the act of writing that sentence, my son, William, who is now two, came running into my office to ask for a fake knife to cut his fake fruit.
The artifice of the story is cut through by the antipathy of writing and mothering. This happens a second time, and on the third the thrust of the child’s hand onto the keyboard makes his presence visible in the text:
Perhaps that is equally 7. My son just typed 7 on my computer.
So motherhood acts beyond the page, and interruption makes for jagged texts, for shards and sharp edges.
In 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, FSG, 2015, and available here
A Personal Anthology 