Status Updates From Monarch

Also, Starved Rock and Aurora, IL mentioned (separately) lol. Aurora specifically being brought up to humble a girl complaining about systemic barriers blocking her from success😭

“Memories I did not know I had lost continued to float back to me. There was, I thought, a watcher inside me.” So much beautiful prose in this book. I’m feeling very satisfied with the context/details that are finally being provided. I like the story both at is surface narrative and at its metaphorical core - comparing all forms of sacrifice for an ideal life as dehumanizing. (?)

The descriptions of depersonalization/derealisation are really hard hitting. No clunky metaphors, just vibes lol.

OOOOOH it’s getting scary!!!!!!

“Time passed, but the loop of the news, the figure eight that gave the illusion of forward progression-the body, the body of the blonde woman-made it impossible to know how long we watched what we already knew.”
The context of this is the narrator watching the aftermath of Nicole Brown-Simpson’s murder televised over and over again before the trial. A very simply critique of the desensitization of news

Dreamlike and full of allegories which i’m enjoying. Barely any real plot so far, honestly just descriptions and vibes but it’s like putting a puzzle together.

“I'll make a mask of your face and sit by your bedside, ready to ventriloquize you into telling yourself the story of your future. When you wake up, you'll have a compulsion to put your portrait up at the end of a long line of other portraits, a wonderful urge to self-memorialize.” 😃

“I have always felt more the beholder than the beholden, which is why it is very hard to believe in God at all.”

So much weird prose that felt disjointed but all came together at the end of the first chapter. Interesting point of view going on with her acknowledging us like twice casually? Im liking this so far.

i'm in love with Wuehle's prose and the spiraling way this story is told