Lindsey

“Her daughter became a doctor. Her daughter would have a daughter, me. · · · She and I would fall in love. We’d speak in songs: “My angel, my angel, you saved my life.” We’d have secrets and hiding places and code words. We’d talk about our hair until we fell asleep. We’d watch old movies and read new books. We’d cry for no reason. We’d cry for every reason all at once. We’d said everything that ever occurred to us to each other, even if it was nothing, or mean, or so mean it was crazy. We’d eat the same foods at exactly the same rates in exactly the same ways. We never said goodbye, always “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Three times. Never enough. “If you ever have a daughter,” she’d tell me, “I declare her a force.”
― Bess Kalb, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (As Told to Me) Story

“Gust used to explain the whole world that way: the mind as a house living in the house of the body, living in the house of a house, living in the larger house of the town, in the larger house of the state, in the houses of America and society and the universe. He said these houses fit inside one another like the Russian nesting dolls they bought for Harriet.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

“I thought what I craved was approval and praise, but it’s simpler than that. I craved acceptance. For all the different versions of me I have been, and all the many lives I have lived.”
― Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

“The girl she can become if her mother is living, the girl she’ll never be if her mother takes her own life.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers