“Utterly spellbound, I’m beginning to realize I’ve never given grief the respect it deserves. Drawing no distinction between strong, weak, rich or poor, it plows through everyone’s lives the same, leaving identical mounds of emotional debris behind.”
― You'd Look Better as a Ghost
― You'd Look Better as a Ghost
“People talk about emotions as though they are stripes on a flag, distinct and tightly hemmed, but mine are always kind of a patchwork.”
― Christa Comes Out of Her Shell
― Christa Comes Out of Her Shell
“What you see is what you get,” these women said about themselves. For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”
― All Fours
― All Fours
“Harmonee had this bizarre look-on-the-bright-side thing, which Mom called a “very pessimistic kind of optimism”: whenever anything bad happened, she said you have to be thankful something worse didn’t happen, and proceeded to imagine and list multiple worse-case scenarios.”
― Happiness Falls
― Happiness Falls
“It frustrated me that society was so determined to quantify grief, as if time could erase the potency of love. Or, on the other hand, how it dictated that grief for someone you knew fleetingly should be equally as fleeting. But while a mother who miscarries might not have ever had the chance to hold that child, they had plenty of time to love them, to dream and hope for them. And that means their grief is twofold—they’re not just grieving the child, but the life they never got to experience. Who are we to tell anyone their pain isn’t worthy?”
― The Collected Regrets of Clover
― The Collected Regrets of Clover
Lauren’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Lauren’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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