Allison

“We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment?”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“It was because I felt like the hotel, the city, the aloneness, these were times where I could feel my skin again; I could feel my body again. I existed again without context—without a stroller, without a man holding my hand. I wouldn’t wear my ring on these trips. It wasn’t because I wanted to fuck around. It was because when I was on airplanes my fingers got cold and skinny and so my ring would drop off and I couldn’t take the panic of worrying that I’d lost it. But also maybe it was the other thing, the context thing, I don’t know. Put it this way: You can feel your body for the first time in a long time, you can feel your skin, then suddenly you can also feel this ring around your finger and the weight of it is suddenly unbearable.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart woman does, the constraints of this world on a woman.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble