Brianne Hailey

“Reality is something that is co-authored,’ the woman says. ‘It makes sense that you would begin to find this disturbing. When someone says that something is not what you think of it as, it can cause slight tremors in the brain, variations in brain activity, and subconscious doubts begin to emerge. Why do you think people experience spiritual awakenings? It’s because the people around us are engaged. The frenzy is a charge that’s contagious.’ ‘Are you saying my mother is contagious?’ ‘No, I’m not. Though maybe I am, in a sense. We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories, too, in the image of what other people remember.’ ‘The doctor says my mother has become unreliable.’ ‘We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not.”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar

“I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption - a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned. But now, I can't even the tally between us. The reason is simple - my mother is forgetting and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way ti make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt.”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar

“No … because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo. And anyways, I think once people know the truth, they will be much more interested in my wife.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“She continues talking about how difficult things were. These tales have been passed down from mothers to daughters since women had mouths and stories could be told. They contain some moral message, some rites of passage. But they also transfer that feeling all mothers know before their time is done. Guilt.”
― Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar