Julia Alvarez

And, you know, recalling those moments of childhood where, you know, I could just see in her face what kind of a day we were going to have as a father.

and daughter, or the tone in her voice, it didn't have to be spoken.

And in the same dictatorship, things couldn't be spoken.

And so you're acutely aware of how to present yourself, given what the circumstances are, the same way that I, as a child, would know what were my behavior parameters for the day, what would be locked in the closet, begging to be let out.

Yeah.

It's also funny, a little anecdotal thing.

You know, of course, people write you or I live in a small town, talk to you about your poem in The New Yorker, but I especially got comments from women of a certain generation, my generation, who remember

I don't know if a young reader would know what a vanity is, maybe think of the abstraction.

But we all knew, they all had mothers that had those little vanities of one kind or another, those mirrors.

So they're quite an image from our childhood, like tetherball and the vanities for...

Yes, yes.

Yeah, that's, even now when you read it, it gives me this heartfelt pang.

There was this privacy and loneliness and this very socially mobile person that could move through the world and had all the power.

That kind of...

touching bottom in yourself, which, you know, one of the reasons that I go to poems is that there are these moments where, I mean, we're with the poet that wrote the poem, but we feel like in that moment, I belong to myself alone.

Thanks, Emily.

Now you can go write your next poem.

But right now, you know, this, I belong to myself alone.

And there's a loneliness there.

Powerlessness there.