Activity

O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's—“I write to discover the next room of my fate.” In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits—or future self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.

M: Somebody once asked W…

There were many people in France writing realistic novels in the nineteenth century—Balzac comes to mind—but Flaubert was the most conscious of what he was doing, and agonized about it the most. Closely observed reality, for its own sake, had not really been a part of the tradition of literature in…

Anger and conflict are not the problem; they are normal aspects of life. Abuse doesn’t come from people’s inability to resolve conflicts but from one person’s decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elem…

If the abuser is the children’s father or father figure, take particular caution not to speak badly of him as a person but only to name and criticize his actions. Children do not want to hear that their dad is mean, selfish, or bad. In cases where the abuser is dangerous, it is helpful to discuss…

Various guidelines for law enforcement personnel are included in Chapter 12. I will review just three critical points here: (1) Abusers need to suffer consequences for their actions now, not just receive warnings of future sanctions, which have little impact on abusers. (2) He can’t overcome his ab…