Not long ago, I picked up a copy of Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction. As many of you know, I used to write fiction all of the time – all of it as yet unpublished – and thought I might get in touch again with my creative self, and the relationship that creative self has to my own personal demons.
Because I remember avoiding therapy when I was 19 for fear that it would hurt my art.
It didn’t. But as a result, my favorite of this collection of essays by various female artists about the intersection of their angst & their art was Diane DiMassa‘s, who, in pictures of course, traces the way her conversations with her therapist became Hothead Paisan.
Of interest to a lot of people who read here is Kate Bornstein’s essay on her experiences with art, demons, & Scientology. So now we know she’s not only a remarkable author, playwright, and performer, but she’s also a pretty fantastic visual artist. (Not that that’s surprising.)
In some ways, this book may be more useful as a way to read about the women’s lives than it is to read about artistic process, though: so many of the essays are more about the strife that caused the art (which ranges from sexual abuse to drugs to cutting to anorexia) than about how the person managed to channel that into their art, exactly. What I’m always interested in is how artists – especially female artists – find the resources to keep going.
So it’s not a how-to guide, but it doesn’t purport to be one, either; it IS a remarkable bunch of women writing about what made their art. It’s published by the very cool Seven Stories, and of course available at amazon.com