"She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. 'The pity fucking kills me,' she said. 'It kills my strength.'"

"She wanted the perception to be 'the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.' She went on: 'The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.' I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even."

From "E. Jean Carroll’s Uneasy Peace/In the year and a half since defeating Trump for the second time, she’s written a secret book — and learned to shoot" (NY Magazine).

At the end of this long article, there's some discussion of the security around her home. Asked if she worried about the danger of turning off her security lights so that the frogs that once mated in her swimming pool would sing again, as they had in the past:

“You understand,” she said, “I don’t care if somebody shoots me. You understand? I don’t really care. I’ve had a nice life. I really mean it. I get it, I’ve had a great life.”

I examined her face, trying to decide if she was being serious. She seemed to be. I remembered something Bill Tonelli, her longtime editor at Esquire, had told me — that Carroll once said she was going to put her dogs’ bodies up in the trees when they died. “Then the birds would come pick them apart, and they would be kind of buried in the air,” he said. “I always imagined somehow that that would be her plan for herself.”

I asked Carroll about this, and she barely took a breath before responding: “I did do it. I buried three dogs that way.” She told me it was how some Native American tribes had long sent off their dead. “When I die,” she continued, “you’ve got to come up here and make sure I’m dropped in a crevice.... There’s a space between two rock formations.... Shall we walk back up to the top so you can see?”