Harriet > Recent Status Updates

Baldwin’s writing is spectacular - I want to read the whole book in one sitting, it’s so addictively intimate and honest but the prospect of it ending is genuinely dreadful!!!!!!

The section on men’s bodies is super interesting. I like the idea that men don’t have bodies:
- “magazines for women have women’s bodies on the covers, magazines for men have men’s bodies on the covers.”

“What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”

Obsessed with the protagonist, obsessed with the setting, obsessed with the prose!!

‘The uses of anger: women responding to racism’ is a really enlightening read - it lays out difficult concepts in a very blunt manner

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners, mute forever while our sisters and selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”

So apparently I know nothing about Russia??

Deeply disturbing and beautifully written

Rickard reminds me a bit of nick from the great Gatsby

Oh I have a feeling I understand it now

Oh my god I’m so intrigued

This has gotta be the most gruesome book I’ve ever read

Not particularly good, so far

The way short, isolated sentences are used in this novel is spectacular, they make me feel sick to my stomach every single time.

They’re been literally just counting this whole chapter and I’m on the edge of my seat

What an interesting premise!!
“As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing.”

I think chap 28 draws a really vivid line between how internalised misogyny so subtle that it hardly presents itself in life can be directly weaponised during the oppression of women - “It’s outrageous, one woman said… what was is about this that made us feel we deserved it?” It’s a fact that I had awareness of before, and understanding of now

The kinda scene where you just have to put the book down and stare at a wall for a little bit

The kinda scene where you just have to put the book down and stare at a wall for a little bit