Cass > Recent Status Updates

This was supposed to be my last read of the year, but my library loan expired before I could finish. Oops

“You know,” I hear Jack say not very quietly to Barry, “I’m all for equal opportunities and box-ticking and disability acts and shit, but I feel like you should have told us Cassandra was on the spectrum before we signed with you.” 🙃

“What the hell is going on? In fairness, I didn’t check my emails at all today” idk, this is making me giggle uncontrollably in a way I haven’t since I first read Bridget Jones

(“Cassandra must stop reacting to stress like a hedgehog.”)

Got the audiobook since best actor of our generation, (white) Michelle Williams, narrates 😍

“(Is that what a memoir is—a ghost tour? I’m confronting what haunts me. I’m out with lanterns, looking.)”

“[Claudia] had on a pair of bright blue Lycra biker shorts, a black lacy tank top, a man’s white dress shirt, baggy purple and white checked socks, red high-tops, and a pair of big gold hoop earrings with a brightly colored wooden parrot perched on each hoop. She was carrying this humongous, bright yellow, plastic beach bag stuffed with junk food for the trip.” Icon.

“I’ve started to hate fairy tales.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said the Woodsman, “you happen to be in one.”

“As he spoke, Jacob believed all he said, but only because he had long before convinced himself of the truth of it. Thus can a man become a liar while holding himself honest.”

“New England is not Virginia but maybe it is when it comes to colour.”

This is so good

Not a Sarah Schulman discussion within the first three minutes of this book I was feeling very skeptical about 😭 Ookay let’s do this

Imagine being dead and finding out someone quotes De Beauvoir calling you “the Ugly Woman” on the first full page of the introduction to your autobiography

“Another story of a long-term “marriage” with an important lesbian writer, Audre Lorde, proves just as off-kilter in its spousal sacrifices.” Omg I didn’t stop and uhhhhh not square quotes over Lorde and Frances’s relationship

“[Toklas’s] belief in Stein’s genius emboldened the writer further. There was no mistaking the fact that Stein was the man of the house, while Toklas played bride and muse. (Stein often called Toklas “wifey.”)” yeah no I am out thanks anyway

“No matter the configuration of gender or sexuality, however, the long-held and much romanticized notion of the “lone genius” persists, as does the stubborn myth of the “tormented genius.” Even in instances when the writer is mediocre at best, if nothing else he is a genius at getting others—namely, his long-suffering wife—to prop him up and perpetuate the myth of his greatness.” Yeah I should stop

““It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” Jane Austen famously wrote in Pride and Prejudice.” The epigraphs and the first line tells me this is going to be a very heterosexual book

Not her toe pulsing while reading Henry Miller 😂

The cover is very misleading, this is off to a very dark start

“I want you to think of the drama that surfaces when you look at the blank page…I’m sorry to say, if it’s been years or even decades since you’ve discharged any energy in your life, the drama might be pretty intense. The anger or grief or repressed intellect or whatever it is that’s under the surface wants to come out, and when you give it an open door, it will do just that.”

Finished the first book, Kathy Goes to Haiti, at the laundromat

Elizabeth refusing to play the Marilyn-inspired character from Miller’s After the Fall and yelling, “I would like to take that man and kick him where it hurts. How base! How base!” is just 😘

Well at least it is already living up to its name, the main character just thought about a Barthes quote during sex

Hard not to notice that ALL of the characters say “he or she” and “him or her,” never “they” or “them.”

“I devour books and art— They shape me. A lump of clay waiting to be sculpted. I pour all I can into me and wake up a new person every day— achy, ravenous, and reaching for the watering can.”

Ew, Faulkner is the worst.