"My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day"
About this Quote
Carter opens her life story by yoking the private fact of pregnancy to the public fact of catastrophe, then undercuts any temptation toward solemn autobiography with a wicked little wink: “with the family talent for magic realism.” The line is doing two things at once. It claims origin-story gravity (a writer gestating as Europe ignites), then immediately shows you she mistrusts origin stories, especially the tidy ones.
The “family talent” phrasing is slyly democratic: magic realism isn’t posed as a lofty literary technique she later “adopted,” but as inherited household equipment, like a cast-iron pan or a nervous habit. That move collapses the hierarchy between high art and domestic talk, which is pure Carter. She wants you to feel how myth-making starts at the kitchen table, not in the seminar room.
The temporal coincidence with World War II functions as a darkly comic astrological sign: her birth aligned with the modern world’s most brutal spectacle, hinting at the obsessions that would animate her work - power, violence, gender as a battlefield, reality as something coerced and rewritten. Yet she refuses to make herself a chosen child of History. The mother’s claim (“on the very day”) is presented as both intimate lore and suspect embellishment, a family anecdote that performs its own fictionality.
In that tension - between record and romance, between documentary time and story time - Carter signals her project. Life arrives already narrated. The trick is noticing who gets to narrate, and how easily “truth” learns to wear a costume.
The “family talent” phrasing is slyly democratic: magic realism isn’t posed as a lofty literary technique she later “adopted,” but as inherited household equipment, like a cast-iron pan or a nervous habit. That move collapses the hierarchy between high art and domestic talk, which is pure Carter. She wants you to feel how myth-making starts at the kitchen table, not in the seminar room.
The temporal coincidence with World War II functions as a darkly comic astrological sign: her birth aligned with the modern world’s most brutal spectacle, hinting at the obsessions that would animate her work - power, violence, gender as a battlefield, reality as something coerced and rewritten. Yet she refuses to make herself a chosen child of History. The mother’s claim (“on the very day”) is presented as both intimate lore and suspect embellishment, a family anecdote that performs its own fictionality.
In that tension - between record and romance, between documentary time and story time - Carter signals her project. Life arrives already narrated. The trick is noticing who gets to narrate, and how easily “truth” learns to wear a costume.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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