"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.�