"If it weren�t for global warming, we�d be under an ice sheet a mile thick right now."

"He gestured toward the mountains. 'But look at us. Earth as far as the eye can see. I love global warming! And I love you!' Something about the implied comparison made me nervous. I was pretty bad as wives go. Where Stephen was concerned possibly epoch-rending, world-destroying bad. But without me he�d be under an ice sheet, so maybe I was doing him a favor. It was plausible. It was also not enough. I said I wasn�t ready. But I had sex with him, feeling like a very dutiful wife."

From Nell Zink's novel "The Wallcreeper."

"My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts... She was, like, 'At your age, the Bront�s were doing X, Y, and Z.'"

"I was definitely a poser as a little kid.... It was just clear to me that�you know, in �Little Women� they�re reading �The Pickwick Papers� and putting out a newspaper and being unbelievably productive, and I was not like that. So I had this feeling of inferiority to past models with or without my mother�s criticisms."

From "Outside In/Nell Zink turned her back on the publishing world. It found her anyway," by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker.

[U]ntil last year, all of Zink�s work was written for a tiny audience�generally as tiny as one or zero.... Burck, her first husband, attributes the clandestine nature and short half-life of Zink�s writing to the Bront�-or-bust standard of her childhood. �The thought that she might write something that wasn�t good was terrifying,� he said, �so it�s safer to not write or not show anybody what you write.� Zink... recognizes that directing her work to one heterosexual man who wasn�t her partner was a way of protecting herself: her writing could be interpreted as flirting, rather than as writing in earnest. �It�s nice to have the excuse of heteronormativity,� she says. �You can explain it away, you can say, �Well, she has a crush on him.� It lowers the risks for me.�