"It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him"
About this Quote
Creative work is the only offspring you can’t stop judging. Bishop’s line lands because it flips the cozy metaphor of “my baby” into something messier: if you’re both father and mother to a text, you’re not just proud-you’re exhausted, implicated, and a little resentful. The phrase “born in such travail” drags writing out of the romantic realm and into labor: not inspiration, but strain. That’s a journalist’s truth telling on itself, the craft as deadline-driven childbirth.
The subtext is a confession about authorship as a trap. To “read for pleasure” requires distance, the ability to encounter something as an object rather than a mirror. Bishop argues that writers are denied that luxury. The work “enslaved him” first-through research, revision, self-doubt, the tyranny of getting it right-then keeps its shackles on afterward because the author can’t stop seeing the seams. What readers experience as flow, the writer remembers as struggle. Pleasure is replaced by postmortem: the sentence you fought over, the paragraph you patched, the fact you didn’t quite say what you meant.
Context matters: mid-20th-century journalism prized production and authority, often at personal cost. Bishop, known for narrative history, worked in a world where bylines were brands and output was currency. The line isn’t self-pity so much as a hard-eyed rebuttal to the fantasy that writers luxuriate in their own prose. It’s the dark joke of the trade: you make the thing, the thing makes demands, and afterward you’re too close to love it like a stranger can.
The subtext is a confession about authorship as a trap. To “read for pleasure” requires distance, the ability to encounter something as an object rather than a mirror. Bishop argues that writers are denied that luxury. The work “enslaved him” first-through research, revision, self-doubt, the tyranny of getting it right-then keeps its shackles on afterward because the author can’t stop seeing the seams. What readers experience as flow, the writer remembers as struggle. Pleasure is replaced by postmortem: the sentence you fought over, the paragraph you patched, the fact you didn’t quite say what you meant.
Context matters: mid-20th-century journalism prized production and authority, often at personal cost. Bishop, known for narrative history, worked in a world where bylines were brands and output was currency. The line isn’t self-pity so much as a hard-eyed rebuttal to the fantasy that writers luxuriate in their own prose. It’s the dark joke of the trade: you make the thing, the thing makes demands, and afterward you’re too close to love it like a stranger can.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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