Willow Reader

“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

“I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.”
― 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

“My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls