"I often reread books I have written"
About this Quote
There is something deliciously brazen about a novelist admitting she rereads her own work: it breaks the polite fiction that authors are merely vessels and that finished books belong only to the public. Taylor Caldwell’s line sounds like vanity at first blush, but the sharper subtext is control. Rereading is a way of repossessing a text after it has been edited, reviewed, marketed, misread, and domesticated by other people’s expectations. It’s also a quiet rebuttal to the cultural demand that writers constantly move on, constantly produce, never linger.
Caldwell wrote big, idea-heavy bestsellers in an era when “serious” prestige and mass readership were often treated as incompatible. For a writer who lived in that seam - popular, prolific, frequently patronized by gatekeepers - rereading can function as self-advocacy. She is her own critic and her own audience, refusing to outsource the final judgment to reviewers who might dismiss her scale as melodrama or her ambition as “too much.”
The intent, then, isn’t just confession; it’s a statement about craft and identity. Writers reread for different reasons: to remember what they actually did on the page, to measure growth, to steal from their past selves, to find the sentence that still surprises them. Caldwell’s phrasing, “often,” makes it routine, almost domestic. The book isn’t a monument; it’s a room she returns to. That normalizes a practice we tend to shame as ego, when it’s also a form of accountability: if you can’t stand to revisit your own work, what exactly did you make the reader live with?
Caldwell wrote big, idea-heavy bestsellers in an era when “serious” prestige and mass readership were often treated as incompatible. For a writer who lived in that seam - popular, prolific, frequently patronized by gatekeepers - rereading can function as self-advocacy. She is her own critic and her own audience, refusing to outsource the final judgment to reviewers who might dismiss her scale as melodrama or her ambition as “too much.”
The intent, then, isn’t just confession; it’s a statement about craft and identity. Writers reread for different reasons: to remember what they actually did on the page, to measure growth, to steal from their past selves, to find the sentence that still surprises them. Caldwell’s phrasing, “often,” makes it routine, almost domestic. The book isn’t a monument; it’s a room she returns to. That normalizes a practice we tend to shame as ego, when it’s also a form of accountability: if you can’t stand to revisit your own work, what exactly did you make the reader live with?
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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