Jenny Jackson > Quotes

“She just bobbed along through life, making dumb f***ing decisions, keeping so cool all the time, emotionally distant and above the fray, never realizing how much she actually cared until it was way too late.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“That’s not interesting, it’s horror! It’s like Demi Moore in The Substance!” “Does a bug bite her in that?” “Worse. She internalizes society’s pressure for women to conform to beauty standards!”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Augusta knew, better than anyone, how hard it was to raise a child when the dad was off fucking someone else.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Ospreys mate for life,” Van said earnestly. “Well, unless they fail to produce chicks after two seasons.” “Then the male osprey joins a gym, gets on Hinge, and finds a teenager with daddy issues.” Caroline nodded.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She had been so used to feeling the full force of Van’s care, manifested with oil changes for her car, cups of coffee delivered to her desk, waterproofing spray for her boots—Van’s love language being, obviously, “acts of service”—that she was startled by the shift. When he did come over, they made out and drank wine and watched movies at her cottage, but she noticed he kept looking at his phone, and when she peered over his shoulder, she saw he was just scrolling through pictures of Dylan, looking at a shared photo site Bailey had made for her friend group. It was better than catching her boyfriend on Tinder, but only barely.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“RJ would stay out all night celebrating. He would drink and smoke and arrive home in an Uber long after midnight, covered in grease and seawater and probably somebody else’s tutu. And while he did that, Fran would run the laundry, would bathe the boys, would turn on nightlights, and would check under beds for monsters, because that was her job, and she felt it harden like a pit in her stomach—to put up with the bullshit, to clean up the mess, and to take care of everyone but herself.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this, and the way it applied to so many interpersonal dynamics - the way that in these old relationships nobody was ever really working from a clean slate, new feelings were built on old feelings.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Bailey dutifully followed orders, keeping her hair clean and pulling on fresh leggings, the idea of jeans still abhorrent.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“On the other side of the blanket Augusta held her baby in her lap, sandy and pink-cheeked, glassy from the late hour. Fran sat next to RJ, her arm lazily draped around his shoulders. Eben and Max were together, looking at something on a phone. And then there was Van, his hair tucked behind his ears, his long legs, bare feet. He was so lovely, but he didn’t belong to her—she needed to let him go. “We’re good, babe,” Bailey said quietly. Colin was lighting sparklers and Bailey watched as he handed them out to the children, the boys crowing with delight. Jane lazily twirled her sparkler in a circle while London waved his back and forth in a zigzag. They made figure eights and squiggles, they danced and pretended the sparklers were magic wands and lightsabers, casting swirls of white in the dark. Even after they had sputtered and fizzled to smoke the streaky lines lingered in Bailey’s eyes, a memory of something bright that was gone.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Augusta’s baby started fussing in her little tent and Bailey went to retrieve her. She held the squirming body awkwardly, paying special attention to her neck. Bailey wished she liked holding newborns, but she didn’t. It wasn’t just that they were fragile, it was that they also reminded her of hairless cats. There was just something too raw about their skin, too naked, and it made her wince slightly.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“When Zoey left to go home, Augusta put her children to bed and then sat out on the back porch, listening to the crickets, wishing Colin were next to her. It was weird she’d been attracted to Stavros. But sexual attraction was a wild card. You could love how someone looked on paper but then feel nothing in person. You could think a guy was dumb as rocks, hate his clothes, and still want to jump his bones. This was why sex was the messy magic at the center of life. It didn’t always make sense, but the power was undeniable.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She had read somewhere that redheads metabolized alcohol better, and she felt like it was a good tradeoff for all the extra sunscreen she needed to use.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“And my friends all smell like weed or little babies. —Taylor Swift, “Florida!!!”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“The fact that he had been with a man felt like an implicit rejection, or a double-layered deceit. He had hidden more than a relationship, but some part of himself. And she had shared everything with him, even the hard and shameful bits.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“He was no more present in their lives than a tax attorney or a dentist, someone they saw at annual intervals with a sense of mild obligation.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“They said he was having “big feelings.” That never really went away”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran felt a nervous tightness pass through her. What if RJ lost a tooth or broke his wrist? What if they had to pay a thousand dollars for dental work? What if he ended up on crutches? There was a line somewhere between the kind of fun that made you feel alive and the kind of fun that inconvenienced everyone around you. Fran couldn’t decide where the Greasy Pole fell. Sure, Fran had her share of hangover days where her parenting had been less than stellar, but for the most part she kept herself in check, always thinking about her kids, about dinner, about laundry, about her savings account. She felt awash in fury at her father. What was he thinking, betting away money he didn’t even have? It was stupid. It was selfish, inconceivably so.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“But whatever the reason, after Augusta’s wedding, Eben had pulled away from her, and Augusta knew she had basically traded her brother for four hours of open bar and two hundred pieces of steak.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She felt like she’d wandered into an advanced yoga class where nothing made sense, and everyone was talking about third eyes and specific nostrils. Bailey just carried on doing what she had been doing, hoping it was right. At some point in the fifteenth hour Vanny left and came back with breath smelling like a peanut butter sandwich, which was disgusting and made Bailey wonder how she had ever found him attractive.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Having children was possibly the most mortifying experience of her life.”
― Jenny Jackson

“She felt lonely and pathetic, but she knew that all across the city there were girls just like her who had spent their Saturday nights waiting for something to happen, nursing a drink or reading a paperback in a coffee shop or scrolling endlessly on their phones, alone and biding their time until their real life would begin.”
― Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street

“It was embarrassing to know that everyone in Greenhead was talking about her, but Augusta refused to stay home and hide. She wanted, years from now, for her children to look back and see a mother who had remained stoic in the face of humiliation, like Princess Diana going off and walking in fields of land mines after Charles dumped her for Camilla.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“but the children greeted each other with the extravagance of astronauts returned from space, falling all over one another and hugging, dropping buckets and towels and blocking the ramp for anyone else trying to get past, and so Augusta herded them all over to the benches so they could carry on with minimal obstruction.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“It’s sad that in this day and age he didn’t feel comfortable just coming out. But also, how could she have missed it? It was her own husband…”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran organized the kitchen, having an engineer’s logic for the placement of cooking utensils and glasses, Van tackled the lighting fixtures, the television, the speakers, and all the electronics, and Bailey did the bedrooms, unrolling rugs, hanging clothes in the closets, and making up the beds with her best hospital corners, a skill she had learned entirely from watching reality shows about yachting.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“There were things you could do with family that you couldn’t do with your friends. You could let them see you wearing the same outfit three days in a row. You could invite them over for lunch and then mostly ignore them as you finally got off hold with the Internet provider. You could have an entire conversation while wearing crest white strips.”
― Jenny Jackson

“There was a line somewhere between the kind of fun that made you feel alive and the kind of fun that inconvenienced everyone around you.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“After the games were over Fran detoured on the way to her parents’ house, picking RJ up for lunch. Sundays were RJ’s day, so Fran knew he would have eaten a weed gummy already and would spend the afternoon with her family pleasantly buzzed and smiling. It was how they survived parenthood and life with small children: They took turns dosing themselves with weed, mushrooms, and booze, whatever made the hard edges softer. Fran had woken up the day before and dropped a tincture of CBD into her coffee, had eaten a square of shroom chocolate with her peanut butter toast, and had spent hours happily building a Lego dragon’s lair with London. They were responsible about it, though, they always made sure one of them was sober enough to play soccer with London, to brush Hale’s teeth, to—God forbid—drive anyone who needed stitches to the emergency room.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“It was stunning to Bailey that this was how babies really came into the world. And through history most of them had done it without drugs, biting on a stick or something. It was too horrible, too outrageous, that in a society that had invented Wi-Fi and eyelash tinting and nanotechnology women still pushed babies out of their vaginas.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect