Jessie Wittman > Recent Status Updates

Making myself reread the whole book in order to get to the last paragraph.

SO. GOOD.

The feeling when a beloved author has a new book….!

His connections of fortitude to the foundations of mental health are incredible!

Inspiring, as always, Miss Mason <3

“I have learned, to my dismay, that I consider suffering in my life to be far more odious than sin. In fact, I have on occasion, sinned in order to keep from suffering.”

"If writing is making sentences, fixing sentences, killing sentences, arranging sentences, how can your writing possibly flow? Flow is what the reader experiences."

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. At visiting hours I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders, I hold its hand and hope it will get better."

Reread it in practically one sitting. Just as gorgeously heartrending as the first time through.

Good gracious this is difficult, but also thrilling

How does Ritvo say so little and yet I can see a FULL DADGUM SCENE. HOW.

His language finds a small crack and splits it open and dives deep to find what is growing at the center of the world. Writing on the edge of death made him a seer.

You know a book is going to be delicious when you’re only two paragraphs into the prologue and already need to put it down to savor the twists at the sentence level!

The miniature scope of Violet pot + snail + white-box invalid room is equaling for a stage for truth telling about companionship and bodily suffering

"Like ultrasound images, [baby] showers tend to make the baby more visible by setting the woman aside. She sits as the body between the gifts and their recipient, unwrapping the presents for the person wrapped inside her."

Nola in the 1720s: “the accident that had called New Orleans into existence had become the locus of an improvisational way of life. It was as though the entire town had been populated with inhabitants parachuted in from as Hieronymus Bosch painting.”

After the storm and the new
stillness of the snow, he returns
to the graveyard, as though
he might lift the white coverlet,
slip in beside her as he used to do,
and again feel, beneath his hand,
her flesh quicken and turn warm.
But he is not her husband now.
To participate in resurrection, one
first must be dead. And he goes
back into the whitened world, alive.

After the storm and the new
stillness of the snow, he returns
to the graveyard, as though
he might lift the white coverlet,
slip in beside her as he used to do,
and again feel, beneath his hand,
her flesh quicken and turn warm.
But he is not her husband now.
To participate in resurrection, one
first must be dead. And he goes
back into the whitened world, alive.