Willow Reader

“It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe—all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn’t love me the way I loved you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked for herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short.”
― Emma Cline

“They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls