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She tells me that around age 4, she began to wear a carpenter’s belt, in which she placed a slingshot, a Swiss Army knife, and other weapons. “I felt good, going around the backyard with that,” she says. “I wanted to have the tools, given what I knew about what people do. Irrational rages, assaults, and so on.”

Still, she believes “good things can be made” of her horrific experience. “I had to do a lot of thinking early on about power relations, and independence of thought, of living.” She resolved to make her own money to control her fate. I ask how old she was when she decided this. “Oh, 5, 6. Again, I saw my very smart, extremely capable mother attacking roses.”

— Jenny Holzer

Most of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses being burned alive in the noonday sun.
Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully, like horses in war.
No, they shook their heads.

[...]

The last page of his project was a photograph of his mother’s rosebush under the kitchen window.
Four of the roses were on fire.

They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats.
Didn’t your mother mind—

— Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red