My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures–it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered–how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience. Nick Flynn
About This Quote

In a literary sense, a catharsis is the release of emotion from the body. In this case, it should have been cathartic for the author to write her book. She writes about the atrocities that she suffered and how these affected her life. In a literary sense, catharsis can be explained as a positive release of emotions from one's body.

The author explains her feelings about how her life was going and how she was going to live with these feelings for the rest of her life. This would have been a positive release of emotions from her body because she did not have to feel all this anymore, but she could use it in a way where she could help others who are going through these things that she went through. For this reason, writing the book was cathartic because it helped her for the rest of her life by giving other people hope and comfort that they can also get through their tragedies.

Source: The Reenactments

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  1. Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider...
  2. If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper, as if a mountain range had openedinside her, but instead, a light coming onin an empty room. The telephonefell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeatinga sunday, dusky. If it had been, we could have cradled...
  3. The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being...
  4. (2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them...
  5. By the time I'm nine I know the world is a dangerous place.  I've heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family.  But no one is offering any clear information.
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