Andreea > Recent Status Updates

"we should never presume to know the intricacies of another person’s craft"

“It was a bit like the great Titanic debate—was there only room for Rose
on that floating door, or could she have made room for him on there, too? Who knows—neither of them could think. They were too fucking cold.”

This was an incredibly difficult part of the book to read. Medical neglect AND medical abuse? Uuuf girl 🫂

If I didn't have to wake up early tomorrow I would read until I finished it. The way she's explaining here the similarity between being famous and being sick, the circularity of both conditions, the sickening side effects of each new medication and public fix, is quite possibly the most clearheaded anyone has ever been. I see now that there are levels to introspection and Lena's at the “hyper advanced” one

“It was easy enough for the people around me to write it off as jealousy, but hatred feels like hatred, no matter who’s directing it at you.” 🚬

“But having just enough to maintain the sheen of cultural currency was the same, to any onlooker, as the currency itself. The Internet wasn’t dealing in nuance.”

“Allison, Zosia, Jemima, and I posed on the red carpet with big, untrained smiles. The only sign that we knew what was coming was that we had all lost an inordinate amount of weight in a fairly short period of time, a fact none of us commented on.”

“OCD is nothing if not a disease that envelops the family whole, as the sufferer ropes everyone they love into their obsessions and compulsions, checks and checks again, demands assurances no one can give”

“Given my demand for a Tim Riggins look-alike, when Adam Driver walked into the room—all ears and nose, gangly and pigeon-toed, lurching toward the audition chair like a reanimated corpse in a silent film —I was…confused. I tried to shake his hand, and he only grunted.” this is the funniest woman alive

This is compulsively readable

“For someone who had made a study of having the right language, I could never summon it when the subject was my own constantly fluctuating level of ease with the outside world.”

“When younger artists tell me about what seem like small triumphs—
getting accepted to a festival, getting a note of encouragement from an artist they love—I always try and remind them to celebrate these early wins. Those first experiences of creative acceptance are unparalleled, because you don’t know enough to worry.”

“Unlike being sick, when you’re famous, nobody feels sorry for you. Fame is viewed, largely, as a condition of privilege that you’ve brought upon yourself. It’s your fault, and it’s also a good thing—even the bad parts seem, to those outside the experience, to be outweighed by the perks.”

"We ordered by marking up a laminated menu with felt-tip erasable markers. We could get any kind of broth, any variety of proteins we wanted, for less than five US dollars each. We picked four hot pot sets: the tomato broth, the wild mushroom broth, the pumpkin broth, and the seafood special." Howwww is this relevant to this specific story? Why didn't she just write a travel book if that's what she wanted?

Didn't Kuang teach in a similar program as the one she describes there? Also the amount of em dashes in this book is so overwhelming, I don't think I've ever been quite this aware of an em dash

“I was starting to get advertisements in my inbox—it seemed that my presence in Taipei had put me on some mailing list that targeted bilingual undergraduates. The qualifications were suspiciously lax. You didn’t have to have special training in teaching English. You didn’t even have to have a bachelor’s degree—undergraduates could apply to teach at the summer programs”

"They killed people to make up their execution quotas. Sometimes they killed people for no reason at all; just the fun of it, because the blade was already moving, and it might as well find something to cut." Kuang keeps burying fantastic sentences in otherwise trite writing. This whole paragraph is a dream to read, but the book it's in doesn't deserve it

"We did our bit to ease international tensions over ‘99 Luftballons." didn't we all at some point 😆

LMAO I know a girl exactly like Anna, Kuang captured the essence of this kind of person perfectly!

Less than half of book to go and only now what was promised comes into play. Curiouser and curiouser!

"We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves." This is a funny line but it doesn't do anything for the paragraph it's in and doesn't fit into the text it's in neither. I would send four laughing emojis to a friend if they sent me a screenshot of this as a tweet though. This is how most of the book is going so far, it's all quite boring and empty!

This is v odd, I DNF Kuang's last novel because I didn't click with the plot and style, but it at least sounded like it was written by the same Kuang who wrote Babel while trying something different, but this novel doesn't sound anything like her, it's as if she wasn't in the room when this was written, what is this????

"You all seem very attentive, very diligent.”
We beamed. We were, at the end of the day, good immigrant daughters.

“Have you not been to Finland?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure. Is it like Sweden? I’ve been to Sweden.”
“No,” Jalo said, suddenly serious.
Carter laughed. “Bit of a rivalry, then, I take it?” Scott asked.
Jalo looked at him hard. “Finland is better than Sweden.”
Scott put his hands up in surrender. “Got it.”

"But when we consider post-scarcity humanity, we must also consider that time is no longer scarce. Efficiency is meant to save time. But their time is infinite. Why try to save something you have in infinite supply?"

"Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.

You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They're all full of stories. There's nowhere left to write.

I think I'm just a bookmark." 👁️

"He couldn’t flirt to save his life, but he knew he had a good body. He would sit with his beer in the tightest T-shirt he’d dared to wear and wait for someone to approach. Someone had always approached." this is hilarious, this successful man is a disaster