"I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then"
About this Quote
Marilyn Hacker’s line has the offhand precision of someone used to being misread by paperwork. On the surface it’s a small autobiographical knot - she lived in a place before she “bought” it - but the sentence is really about how life, especially a working writer’s life, rarely fits the clean chronology demanded by institutions. The timeline loops because the lived fact came first; ownership arrives later, almost as an afterthought, like the state catching up to reality.
The subtext is class and stability, said without melodrama. A studio apartment is intimate, constrained, unglamorous. Staying put for decades sounds like rootedness, but Hacker frames it as something earned and managed: she occupied the space, then secured it, then kept the address and phone number like hard-won continuity. In a culture that treats mobility as success and reinvention as virtue, the insistence on sameness reads as quiet resistance. It’s also a poet’s sense of how an “address” is both literal and existential: where you can be reached, where you can return to yourself.
Context matters: buying property in 1989, after living there since 1985, nods to an era of urban real-estate churn, gentrification pressures, and the precarious economics of artistic labor. The clipped, almost bureaucratic phrasing (“address and phone number”) doubles as a small manifesto: identity isn’t the brand-new self; it’s the long-held line that still connects.
The subtext is class and stability, said without melodrama. A studio apartment is intimate, constrained, unglamorous. Staying put for decades sounds like rootedness, but Hacker frames it as something earned and managed: she occupied the space, then secured it, then kept the address and phone number like hard-won continuity. In a culture that treats mobility as success and reinvention as virtue, the insistence on sameness reads as quiet resistance. It’s also a poet’s sense of how an “address” is both literal and existential: where you can be reached, where you can return to yourself.
Context matters: buying property in 1989, after living there since 1985, nods to an era of urban real-estate churn, gentrification pressures, and the precarious economics of artistic labor. The clipped, almost bureaucratic phrasing (“address and phone number”) doubles as a small manifesto: identity isn’t the brand-new self; it’s the long-held line that still connects.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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