The Past is the place where anti-Semitism and racism and misogyny were woven into the very warp and weft of literature

I kept toying with this idea—the idea that I was writing the autobiography of the audience. But I wasn’t seeing myself as an audience member clearly—was only dimly aware that my perspective from my perch in the Present was not necessarily enlightened. An autobiography of the audience should be subject to the same rules that govern all memoir, including the rule that the writer of memoir must be onto herself. Which is to say that bad memoir happens when an author is a little in love with herself—when she can’t see her own faults. The same thing could be said of the audience: we think we’re fantastically enlightened, but are we really so much better than the people who came before us?