An Explanation, II

"She understood at the bone the willful transgression implicit in the literary enterprise—knew that to express one-self was to expose oneself, that to seize the stage was to court humiliation, that to claim the independence implicit in the act of writing could mean becoming like the women she described in Sleepless Nights, left to 'wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for'—and she accepted the risk. Every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one’s own experience in the world, one’s own intuitions about how it worked." Joan Didion