Status Updates From The House on Mango Street

There are so many notes in this book that are so familiar. The shoes anxiety because it’s the pair you’ve got by they’re not nice even if your new clothes are. The clubhouse in the back of an abandoned car. The bit with “take your kool-aid into the other room” and the house with the plastic couch covers. The linoleum floor of the church basement with all the cousins. I can see my childhood in it all.

Reading this on the heels of Catcher has my mind turning. This dreamy choppy entry into teenager hood vs Holden’s mental breakdown exit from teenager hood. Narrators who see everything but only look at it from the edges and the truth sort of slips in around the poetic phrasing or rambling digressions. I haven’t fully worked my opinions on it out.

Another note that stands out in this is how hard it is to estimate the narrator’s age. Like is it happening over years? sometimes she seems like she’s 9 or 10 but other details (like being old enough to have her first job) discounts that. But that is what being a preteen and an early teenage feels like. You’re a little kid. You’re the oldest person in the world. You don’t know anything. You know everything

This author is so good at a turn of phrase. Just these single unremarkable sentences that paint an entire picture of the moment and the dominos out from the moment. “Two boys were getting hollered at. One for something he did and another for something he didn’t” + “I always cry when nuns yell even when they don’t yell” and like yeah I know what your school is like.

Worst book in the history of books