I'm always hesitant about giving advice to young women.
I moved to New York in 1978.
It was a different city then.
And the idea of achieving... success... is something that was actually counter to my own ambitions.
When I was young, what I wanted to try to do was write something that I thought was... good, by my own lights.
And that had to suffice as success.
Now, I do think that people need... Especially young women... encouragement of some kind to keep writing.
To write in a vacuum is a very painful thing for any person.
But for people... women, people of color, people who are marginalized and have been marginalized in literary culture, it's harder.
My advice, I suppose, would be to... not accept the definitions of success that are repeatedly given to us in this culture.
