Tammy

“I had been too embarrassed then,” she says. “Simply put, I thought I was fat. And I didn’t think it was tasteful for a married woman to do something like that. My mother was right. I was a terrible snob. But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.” When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist. “It had been decades,” Patricia says. “But I just called William like no time had passed and said, I’m ready to pose for you. God, that’s what impresses me now the most. How I just did that. It felt like the boldest thing I had ever done, somehow scarier than even getting married. “William and I didn’t have an affair,” she adds. “Even though I know that’s what Lila must think. I just wanted him to paint me. I needed him to document my body as it was at that precise moment. Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit. To feel proud, actually. That saved me. But let me be clear. Not from myself.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Getting back into reading feels like stepping inside the house of a beloved friend she hasn’t seen for a long time. It feels like coming home.”
― Libby Page, This Book Made Me Think of You

“You don’t need all my stuff to remember me. You’ve got all the memories.”
― Libby Page, This Book Made Me Think of You

“The trauma someone else created is not your fault, but dealing with it is your responsibility.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake: A Memoir