Michele > Recent Status Updates

I can’t stop talking to her because every time we are talking through that door with the light behind her, I think maybe this will be the last time I’ll see her..And when I leave her, I get on my bike and smile and wave goodbye. Then I pedal fast as hell because the pressure sobs are rising up in me and once they start there is nothing I can do to stuff them back.

Me and Niecy weren't sisters, and nowhere near twins. I didn't have what she got nor the other way around. What you have the same isn't what binds you. Hearts grow strings because of what you know that's the same, what happened to you that's the same. And when what you want is the same.

The house is a constant reminder of all the years I have been without a voice, all the years I have tried to please others instead of myself, all the years I have fashioned myself into what a good wife is supposed to act like and look like. I’m an imposter here.

“Mothers don’t walk out on their children, no matter how loudly the siren song of a past love calls to them. Peter might need me, but my kids needed me more. Mothers don’t leave.”

“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret. This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life.”

"Too much love?"
"Not too much love, more like too much crippling dependency on the part of the parent, which masquerades as love."
"I never thought about that," I said, and truly, I had not, though it had been right there in front of me all these years.
"Our parents," Leda said, "did not depend on us for their sense of identity. They had their lives and we had ours. Bless them."

“We were loved, not passionately but enough, and we were largely ignored, which allowed for our healthy separation from the primary family. Necessity made us resourceful and brave. We were left to solve our own problems and so we did. The children you should worry about are the ones who are the singular light of their parents’ lives, the ones who hit thirty and are still calling their mom five times a day.”

“People have no understanding of how love works,” Eddie said. “They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.”

“Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, ‘What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.’ I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.

“Of course, if there is one lesson grief teaches, it is that there is no sense in some things. Still, I know if Ruth’s mother were alive, she would handle this, draw from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with.”

It started out strong, the writing is wonderful but I lost interest after a few chapters. I made it through 100 pages which was once my “rule,” I couldn’t abandon a book until I’d read that far along. Eh. Life’s too short. Moving on.

“I watch more and more television, my glowing friend, the one thing in the house that does not yell or cry, that won’t use me to send messages to others.”

Giving up here, I just can’t continue on with this book. So overdone, so repetitious, I am just bored.

“But she never does. She never comes to. I can't make sense of it. If my weight isn't enough to get Mom to wake up, then nothing will be. And if nothing can wake her up, then that means she's really going to die. And if she's really going to die, what am I supposed to do with myself? My life purpose has always been to make Mom happy, to be who she wants me to be. So without Mom, who am I supposed to be now?”

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces than we have no conception of, always it is temporary.”

“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”

It’s as natural as being born..and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, here's an immortality of organic molecules..we’ll become part of the grass and trees and animals..we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive.People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes.So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it.

“There's no decent literature on how to die..Only a lot of religious gobbledygook about being gathered in to God, and a lot of biological talk about returning your elements to the earth…but it doesn't say anything about what religion is talking about, the essential you, the conscious part of you, and it doesn't teach you anything about how to make the transition from being to not-being.”

Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?
The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from…ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? (Cont’d)

“Everything was slightly angled, as if placed there by a drunk on his knees.”
“I followed..into a space that looked like it had been attacked by a cannon that shot out toys.”
“…a package of Fig Newton cookies that looked like it had been ripped open by a wolf.”
2 things I dislike: overuse of similes & forced pop culture references to “prove” the time period. This has both in the first 7 pages. DNF

“Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

“Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”

I suppose he has an impulse to bed her right there in the pneumatic moss, reproducing a scene between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper that he has reread several times in a borrowed, bootlegged copy. Her eyes are laughing and alive. I suppose he reaches for her. I suppose she fends him off. That is what girls did in 1933. They walk again.