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christinanwrth's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault, Rape, and Abortion
dawndeydusk's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
tense
4.0
"the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be" (47)
"It is difficult to imagine being content for more than ten minutes with even the sharper, creamiest parmesan crumbled over taut spaghetti, though this comes a little closer to it" (137)
"despite its promise to make the unmanageable manageable, language is not a complete tool for recording the world...Writing is the collision of thoughts with events, translated into a material form and then back again into the whisper of a feeling" (155)
"A few months ago, I read a feel-good--or maybe it was horrifying--news story about an elderly couple in Rome who found themselves so despairing with loneliness they wept and wept until the neighbors called the state police. Four officers knocked on the door and made the couple spaghetti with parmesan to soothe them. One officer described the encounter: ' Sometimes the loneliness melts in to tears. Sometimes it's like a summer storm. It comes suddenly and overtakes one.' I thought. I don't want to live through that. But also, I thought, how many millions of people are sitting in their apartments right now with no reprieve from their isolation? I've had peace and privacy, living without a hundred housemates with a hundred opinions, for three months out of my three decades. I cherish this quiet, this long-awaited solitude. But for many, aloneness, for years, and involuntarily, unkind--that's a different story. Millions of people not kept busy enough to assuage this dread." (185)
"I shudder because of the plans I made--and documented--and then never fulfilled. The voice from the past that was so desperate for a future. Whose voice is that...It's touching, I suppose, to see myself like that, a girl of future action. But mostly there is chagrin circling the absence of my follow-through. Fantasy futures not lived, having never lived." (195)
"Perhaps, I have thought, the notes are not strictly for revisiting. Perhaps they're artefacts of good intentions. They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they'll be returned to, retrieved, revised. Notes; hope! Their real addressee is time--things being recorded as they pass by, for the future note-reader to recall. Gestures towards a future that will almost certainly not care." (201)
"If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean." (205)
"It is difficult to imagine being content for more than ten minutes with even the sharper, creamiest parmesan crumbled over taut spaghetti, though this comes a little closer to it" (137)
"despite its promise to make the unmanageable manageable, language is not a complete tool for recording the world...Writing is the collision of thoughts with events, translated into a material form and then back again into the whisper of a feeling" (155)
"A few months ago, I read a feel-good--or maybe it was horrifying--news story about an elderly couple in Rome who found themselves so despairing with loneliness they wept and wept until the neighbors called the state police. Four officers knocked on the door and made the couple spaghetti with parmesan to soothe them. One officer described the encounter: ' Sometimes the loneliness melts in to tears. Sometimes it's like a summer storm. It comes suddenly and overtakes one.' I thought. I don't want to live through that. But also, I thought, how many millions of people are sitting in their apartments right now with no reprieve from their isolation? I've had peace and privacy, living without a hundred housemates with a hundred opinions, for three months out of my three decades. I cherish this quiet, this long-awaited solitude. But for many, aloneness, for years, and involuntarily, unkind--that's a different story. Millions of people not kept busy enough to assuage this dread." (185)
"I shudder because of the plans I made--and documented--and then never fulfilled. The voice from the past that was so desperate for a future. Whose voice is that...It's touching, I suppose, to see myself like that, a girl of future action. But mostly there is chagrin circling the absence of my follow-through. Fantasy futures not lived, having never lived." (195)
"Perhaps, I have thought, the notes are not strictly for revisiting. Perhaps they're artefacts of good intentions. They are the insisted-upon valour of making the (always-broken) promise that they'll be returned to, retrieved, revised. Notes; hope! Their real addressee is time--things being recorded as they pass by, for the future note-reader to recall. Gestures towards a future that will almost certainly not care." (201)
"If anything of me lives on after I am dead, I hope it will not be what I failed to get done. When I die, when it happens, please throw my MacBook into the ocean." (205)
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault and Rape
icinskip's review
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape and Misogyny
Moderate: Homophobia
callmeamelia's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape and Abortion
kayleyhyde's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault
Moderate: Sexism, Sexual content, and Abortion
Minor: Rape
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