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lilyabryant's review against another edition
4.0
It feels like the summer of girlhood and this was a great piece of it for me. This set of stories had equally heartbreaking and heartwarming stories to share. Probably not many that I’ll remember forever but definitely enough tho capture me in the moment. The last story was definitely the strongest piece.
reillyharr82's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
elkiebear's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
fathuert's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
you could ask me what this book is about and i wouldn’t know what to say…
jr2234's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars. A collection of short stories with the theme of womanhood. I enjoyed almost all of them, though none stood out (with the exception of the last essay, The Wayside). Most stories are dark and pessimistic, which I’d keep in mind before reading.
rosalie362819's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
Favourite quotes:
only the good//
“Before opening my eyes, I considered all of the beds I could be in, and I felt for a moment that I was in each one…”
“Every year since they'd been married I'd thought, Well, they're older than I am. I'll get there. But I keep arriving at their previous age having progressed neither in their direction nor in any particular direction whatsoever.”
“I was informed of this in the bathroom at work by two little parallel lines, which appeared before me like two paths I could take.”
“It was unsettling that a thought such as I will sleep with him, I guess had the potential to become a dot that had the potential to become a baby that had the potential to become a person that had the potential to—who knows?-burn one hundred people to death in a fire, or save one hundred people from death in a fire, and that each one of those hundred people, burned or alive, could also have been born or not born, depending on a decision that their mother had made, once upon a time, while sitting on the cold linoleum floor of a bathroom at work.”
“Perhaps I'd live a long life. I thought about what I had brought for lunch, or if I had remembered to bring lunch, or if somewhere along my path that morning I had decided I would eat Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. If I hadn't remembered my lunch today, would I remember my lunch tomorrow? Was there anything in the fridge for dinner? Had I flossed even once this week? If I didn't deal with these little lines, would I have to raise a baby? How would I get home today? Presumably, the same way as always: the walk to the subway, the changeover at Union Square. Sometimes it was all too much to bear. Maybe Hugh was right. Maybe at thirty-five you just started to believe it, that daily living itself was supposed to be a trial. But I didn't want to believe it…”
“If you separated us into our different environments me in this messy apartment, him in the desert wearing fatigues or at home with his wife-you could no longer tell that we had come from the same place, but neither could you determine when we'd diverged, what choices we had made or what choices had been made for us. It was hard to tell when people grew up, exactly, or why. When had my brother decided to stop tying my hair to the kitchen chairs? To stop locking me in the bathroom? To stop shooting rubber bands in my face?”
elegy//
“You consider the jokes you could make if people didn't look at you with such pity, something about making a clean ___ of it, getting things off your ___. It's not really a joke, you guess. Really, your heart hammers in your ___, and sadness rises in your ___ and you think perhaps you've always played your
cards too close to your ___.”
“If there were brains in their heads [Barbies] they'd be wondering what kind of woman you've become, wondering if you've used your body to its full advantage, or if you ve used it beyond its full advantage and now it's paying the price.”
“Here, you want to say, have my puffy cheeks, my healthy cells, but all you can do is hand her books, water, photographs. All you can do is watch as she becomes smaller, becomes sweatier, begins speaking in tongues.”
“Maybe this is your future career path-the market for non-shitty get-well cards seems largely untapped. And what about cards for those who might never get well?”
“Age 22. The boys are soft, warm weights. They are shots of hard liquor and the morning payback. They are carnival goldfish, shiny and forgetful, easily lost and won. They are songs performed live that make you sway, swoon, swell, that end with a chord you can't play but they can, and you can feel it vibrate and echo through you. They are vampires, werewolves, things that appeared in the night to confess, convert, cry, come. They are moonlit shadows dancing on the wall, dark and featureless, versions of the truth. In the sunlight, always, they expand and disappear.”
“Age 12. For over a decade there is no "them" to notice, until one day you follow some boy's unguarded gaze, and you find them there, foreign hills sprouting from your chest, appearing without your encouragement or consent, throwing you instantly into some stage of life you don't want any part of.”
pets are for rich kids//
“I had this picture in my head of my dad, a picture of what he looked like one night before he left, his face moonlit, his hand smoothing my covers, his mouth saying, "People are gonna tell you that you can always make a good choice, but those are the kinds of people who have choices." And I was pretty sure which kind of person Willa was and which kind of person I was.”
middlemen//
“But the secret is, as we sit side by side in bed watching TV on my little whirring laptop, huddled up close to make out the sound from my cheap speakers, the computer warming us, and the light shining on our faces as if we are staked out around a campfire, alone in dark woods, far away from anyone who cares what we do, sometimes then I think I'm just a finger's width away from the life I am supposed to be living.”
“We are all adults, I realize daily, realize once again. We can do anything we want.”
“I wonder, sometimes, if all his questions aren't really just the same two questions appearing in different forms: What makes a person love a person? What makes a lover leave?”
“Does it count when you get what you want but you have to share?”
the replacements//
“‘He's not the man I married,’ women always say, but that wasn't the problem. It was more that while I hadn't meant to end up with Jay, I hadn't meant not to either.”
“But what had I chosen? Looking at that picture was like staring at myself from across a canyon. Back then, I thought the future expanded out around me in every direction. I thought the choice could be mine and mine again. But the ground had cracked at my feet, and it was the strangest feeling now, to look across the abyss, having arrived on some other side without ever having picked a direction at all.”
none of these will bring disaster//
“LIVING ALONE, MINUSES. It is lonely, even if you work fifty-hour weeks. What I want, desperately, is for someone to sit next to me for a moment and hold my hand and say one kind thing I didn't know was true.”
“He looks at his watch even though there is a giant clock right next to my bed. ‘God, I have to take the train back home, I guess.’ I don't like how impressed guys are with themselves when their lines work, as if girls are idiots, as if we don't know what's going on.”
“JOBS, PEOPLE, CITIES. Nothing is ever really yours. I just want something to stick around long enough for me to leave it first.”
“I don't understand. I don't understand anything about why people leave, and I don't understand what makes me so leavable. I think this is turning me into a meeker person than I already am, the kind of person who spends relationships spooning coffee grounds quietly into the garbage can, for fear of disturbing the peace. I wonder if it's different if you do the leaving. Maybe you feel as if you've given something away, rather than lost it. Maybe it's as if it could be yours again, if only you wanted it.”
how to wait//
“Do not try to cherish every moment. This will only ruin every moment. Know that there are things you will miss, lose, wish for longingly in the night, but do not think about what these things are, do not think about the ways in which you will not know him anymore.”
unattached//
“And then it would be over, and I'd be tired again, my chest heaving, and I'd begin to worry about the things that can befall a person while running, while being outdoors, while being a woman: rape, murder, relentless ridicule that cuts to the bone.”
“It's strange how calm I am in a crisis, because I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of people: waiters, tech support, pizza delivery guys, coworkers, even the people I'm supposed to know. I'm also afraid of transportation: planes, subways, trains, buses, cars, elevators. Also, invisible things: carbon monoxide, those brain-eating amoebas found in lakes. I am farseeing, a chess player calculating all of fate's possible moves. Expect the Unexpected! is my motto, but even in the many, detailed, and wild scenarios my brain has conjured, I never expected this.”
“I was impressed. Even fifty months of dating was unfathomable to me. How long did it take to settle into the idea that a person was going to stay, and then move on to worrying about something else, like when they were going to die—or worse, go crazy?”
“In those moments, nothing else mattered, not the petty details of existence, like homework and the dishes, and not the bigger ones either, like my parents' impending divorce and whether or not I would manage to do anything worthwhile with my time on the overheating planet. How safe I'd always felt, nestled in the soft aftermath of catastrophe, protected, finally, from the terror and exhaustion of anticipating disaster.”
first aid//
“Here's a lesson from basic psychology. Let's say something bad happens to you. You can't stop the bad thing from happening, because you're too little, or whatever. You roll up into a ball like a gray stone and let the bad thing happen to you. It's an ideal solution, because stones feel nothing. (There's a Simon and Garfunkel song all about this.) But, new problem: How does one become human again after being a stone?”
the wayside//
“"I'm going into journalism," she said. It was starting to feel like everyone around here was a writer or was trying to be one, as if greatness could rub off on people and onto things and back onto people again.”
“I told him once that he shouldn't have to go. ‘I don't have to go,’ he said. ‘We have a volunteer army.’ I wanted to say that he hadn't volunteered to be unable to afford college unless he joined the military, but it wasn't the time to get into it.”
“The irony of living in a tourist town is that the residents themselves rarely visit the historical sites.”
“It had a sign out front: I WENT TO THE WOODS BECAUSE I WISHED TO LIVE DELIBERATELY, TO FRONT ONLY THE ESSENTIAL FACTS OF LIFE. The essential facts of life? What were they? Thoreau had never been a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“I looked down at my hands, the white crescents of my fingernails chewed nearly to nothing. I thought of Julie's nails, how she let them grow, glossed them clear so that even in the diner's dimness they each reflected a thin, white strip of light that floated back and forth across her nails as she moved her hands. How could you tell a girl from a woman? It wasn't age, anyway.”
“I wanted to tell him about Ted, tell him I had just done it to get it done with, to be Julie, to not be Audrey, to find out if that was the difference between the last piece of my life and the next, but that I didn't find out anything. Sometimes the only difference between doing something and not doing something was what you could claim later.”
“It was unsettling that a thought such as I will sleep with him, I guess had the potential to become a dot that had the potential to become a baby that had the potential to become a person that had the potential to—who knows?-burn one hundred people to death in a fire, or save one hundred people from death in a fire, and that each one of those hundred people, burned or alive, could also have been born or not born, depending on a decision that their mother had made, once upon a time, while sitting on the cold linoleum floor of a bathroom at work.”
“Perhaps I'd live a long life. I thought about what I had brought for lunch, or if I had remembered to bring lunch, or if somewhere along my path that morning I had decided I would eat Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. If I hadn't remembered my lunch today, would I remember my lunch tomorrow? Was there anything in the fridge for dinner? Had I flossed even once this week? If I didn't deal with these little lines, would I have to raise a baby? How would I get home today? Presumably, the same way as always: the walk to the subway, the changeover at Union Square. Sometimes it was all too much to bear. Maybe Hugh was right. Maybe at thirty-five you just started to believe it, that daily living itself was supposed to be a trial. But I didn't want to believe it…”
“If you separated us into our different environments me in this messy apartment, him in the desert wearing fatigues or at home with his wife-you could no longer tell that we had come from the same place, but neither could you determine when we'd diverged, what choices we had made or what choices had been made for us. It was hard to tell when people grew up, exactly, or why. When had my brother decided to stop tying my hair to the kitchen chairs? To stop locking me in the bathroom? To stop shooting rubber bands in my face?”
elegy//
“You consider the jokes you could make if people didn't look at you with such pity, something about making a clean ___ of it, getting things off your ___. It's not really a joke, you guess. Really, your heart hammers in your ___, and sadness rises in your ___ and you think perhaps you've always played your
cards too close to your ___.”
“If there were brains in their heads [Barbies] they'd be wondering what kind of woman you've become, wondering if you've used your body to its full advantage, or if you ve used it beyond its full advantage and now it's paying the price.”
“Maybe this is your future career path-the market for non-shitty get-well cards seems largely untapped. And what about cards for those who might never get well?”
“Age 22. The boys are soft, warm weights. They are shots of hard liquor and the morning payback. They are carnival goldfish, shiny and forgetful, easily lost and won. They are songs performed live that make you sway, swoon, swell, that end with a chord you can't play but they can, and you can feel it vibrate and echo through you. They are vampires, werewolves, things that appeared in the night to confess, convert, cry, come. They are moonlit shadows dancing on the wall, dark and featureless, versions of the truth. In the sunlight, always, they expand and disappear.”
“Age 12. For over a decade there is no "them" to notice, until one day you follow some boy's unguarded gaze, and you find them there, foreign hills sprouting from your chest, appearing without your encouragement or consent, throwing you instantly into some stage of life you don't want any part of.”
pets are for rich kids//
“I had this picture in my head of my dad, a picture of what he looked like one night before he left, his face moonlit, his hand smoothing my covers, his mouth saying, "People are gonna tell you that you can always make a good choice, but those are the kinds of people who have choices." And I was pretty sure which kind of person Willa was and which kind of person I was.”
middlemen//
“But the secret is, as we sit side by side in bed watching TV on my little whirring laptop, huddled up close to make out the sound from my cheap speakers, the computer warming us, and the light shining on our faces as if we are staked out around a campfire, alone in dark woods, far away from anyone who cares what we do, sometimes then I think I'm just a finger's width away from the life I am supposed to be living.”
“We are all adults, I realize daily, realize once again. We can do anything we want.”
“I wonder, sometimes, if all his questions aren't really just the same two questions appearing in different forms: What makes a person love a person? What makes a lover leave?”
“Does it count when you get what you want but you have to share?”
the replacements//
“‘He's not the man I married,’ women always say, but that wasn't the problem. It was more that while I hadn't meant to end up with Jay, I hadn't meant not to either.”
“But what had I chosen? Looking at that picture was like staring at myself from across a canyon. Back then, I thought the future expanded out around me in every direction. I thought the choice could be mine and mine again. But the ground had cracked at my feet, and it was the strangest feeling now, to look across the abyss, having arrived on some other side without ever having picked a direction at all.”
none of these will bring disaster//
“LIVING ALONE, MINUSES. It is lonely, even if you work fifty-hour weeks. What I want, desperately, is for someone to sit next to me for a moment and hold my hand and say one kind thing I didn't know was true.”
“He looks at his watch even though there is a giant clock right next to my bed. ‘God, I have to take the train back home, I guess.’ I don't like how impressed guys are with themselves when their lines work, as if girls are idiots, as if we don't know what's going on.”
“JOBS, PEOPLE, CITIES. Nothing is ever really yours. I just want something to stick around long enough for me to leave it first.”
“I don't understand. I don't understand anything about why people leave, and I don't understand what makes me so leavable. I think this is turning me into a meeker person than I already am, the kind of person who spends relationships spooning coffee grounds quietly into the garbage can, for fear of disturbing the peace. I wonder if it's different if you do the leaving. Maybe you feel as if you've given something away, rather than lost it. Maybe it's as if it could be yours again, if only you wanted it.”
how to wait//
“Do not try to cherish every moment. This will only ruin every moment. Know that there are things you will miss, lose, wish for longingly in the night, but do not think about what these things are, do not think about the ways in which you will not know him anymore.”
unattached//
“And then it would be over, and I'd be tired again, my chest heaving, and I'd begin to worry about the things that can befall a person while running, while being outdoors, while being a woman: rape, murder, relentless ridicule that cuts to the bone.”
“It's strange how calm I am in a crisis, because I'm afraid of everything. I'm afraid of people: waiters, tech support, pizza delivery guys, coworkers, even the people I'm supposed to know. I'm also afraid of transportation: planes, subways, trains, buses, cars, elevators. Also, invisible things: carbon monoxide, those brain-eating amoebas found in lakes. I am farseeing, a chess player calculating all of fate's possible moves. Expect the Unexpected! is my motto, but even in the many, detailed, and wild scenarios my brain has conjured, I never expected this.”
“I was impressed. Even fifty months of dating was unfathomable to me. How long did it take to settle into the idea that a person was going to stay, and then move on to worrying about something else, like when they were going to die—or worse, go crazy?”
“In those moments, nothing else mattered, not the petty details of existence, like homework and the dishes, and not the bigger ones either, like my parents' impending divorce and whether or not I would manage to do anything worthwhile with my time on the overheating planet. How safe I'd always felt, nestled in the soft aftermath of catastrophe, protected, finally, from the terror and exhaustion of anticipating disaster.”
first aid//
“Here's a lesson from basic psychology. Let's say something bad happens to you. You can't stop the bad thing from happening, because you're too little, or whatever. You roll up into a ball like a gray stone and let the bad thing happen to you. It's an ideal solution, because stones feel nothing. (There's a Simon and Garfunkel song all about this.) But, new problem: How does one become human again after being a stone?”
the wayside//
“"I'm going into journalism," she said. It was starting to feel like everyone around here was a writer or was trying to be one, as if greatness could rub off on people and onto things and back onto people again.”
“I told him once that he shouldn't have to go. ‘I don't have to go,’ he said. ‘We have a volunteer army.’ I wanted to say that he hadn't volunteered to be unable to afford college unless he joined the military, but it wasn't the time to get into it.”
“The irony of living in a tourist town is that the residents themselves rarely visit the historical sites.”
“It had a sign out front: I WENT TO THE WOODS BECAUSE I WISHED TO LIVE DELIBERATELY, TO FRONT ONLY THE ESSENTIAL FACTS OF LIFE. The essential facts of life? What were they? Thoreau had never been a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“I looked down at my hands, the white crescents of my fingernails chewed nearly to nothing. I thought of Julie's nails, how she let them grow, glossed them clear so that even in the diner's dimness they each reflected a thin, white strip of light that floated back and forth across her nails as she moved her hands. How could you tell a girl from a woman? It wasn't age, anyway.”
songcatchers's review against another edition
4.0
'Did all rites of passage include blood?'
The female perspective from young childhood (the moment of conception in one story!) to adulthood. Captures some of the difficult choices of being/becoming a woman. There's a particularly powerful story (Elegy) told in reverse about a hard decision a woman makes about her breasts after gene testing. Beautiful and brutal.
'What was bad was that life was all about waiting for adult things to get less bad.'
The female perspective from young childhood (the moment of conception in one story!) to adulthood. Captures some of the difficult choices of being/becoming a woman. There's a particularly powerful story (Elegy) told in reverse about a hard decision a woman makes about her breasts after gene testing. Beautiful and brutal.
'What was bad was that life was all about waiting for adult things to get less bad.'
rachaelvalles's review against another edition
1.0
DNF - kind of depressing. Not in the mood for this kind of heavy.
sky_jumper's review against another edition
"pets are for rich kids" is such a bad story that i put this book down to avoid reading another one that's just as bad or, gasp, worse