Marriage is never static. There are peaks and troughs, cycles. It is easy to forget that this shifting landscape is really only ever a reflection of the self. Our capacity for attachment determines the kind of mate we attract, and it is through this mate that we are forever transformed – marriage as alchemy, but also as a mirror.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

My generation was, in effect, the product of a social experiment. If we did not understand marital intimacy, it was because we had not seen it modelled. We lurched from relationship to relationship, dazzled by the newness of meaninglessness, relentless in our search for something even the most perceptive of us could not identify.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

My handsome husband and I didn’t make love for almost six months. I was enraptured, lost to my old life, and, in this obsession, disregarded author Eyelet Waldman – who famously wrote of her 'smug well-being' and 'always vital, even torrid' sex life in the wake of childbirth: I ignored my husband as a man. Instead, I revealed in him as a different thing altogether, far more seductive and important, and infinitely more resonant. My husband was no longer just a man: he was the father of my child.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Ninety-six percent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 percent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the world. A third are male. One study revealed that over 50 percent of prostitutes are the children of alcoholics or substance abusers, and 90 percent are deflowered through incest or rape. Ninety-one percent of prostitutes do not speak of the abuse. (The truth of life is told through the language of behavior.) Abused children suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, self-destructive impulses, suspicion, fear. Seventy-five percent of prostitutes attempt suicide. (Imagine their scrapbook of memories.)

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

One of the biggest misconceptions remains that Neil Gaiman spent his youth lurching from bedsit to library and back again, subsisting on a diet of blood-temperature baked beans and the wild leeks he managed to pull from the side of a disused railway track. It is a misconception that he nurtures, whether consciously or otherwise, through omission.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Our culture is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory in many sectors.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Repudiating the vulnerability I felt had wrecked the lives of women around me, I modelled myself on my controlled father. I wanted his freedom and his focus. To him, a family was an aquarium: controlled, contained. To the women I knew, a family was everything.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame. But sense is made of the world only through relationship between action and reaction, symptom and cause. No change is possible without analysis of accountability.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke