Meagan > Recent Status Updates

Going to shelve this one to finish next Christmas season. It will stay in my current reading until then!

This is the type of book that makes me think I can FOR SURE be an author. Astonishingly vapid. Are all of these chick-lit romances so saccharine and sexual? This is not the genre for me, I learned. My eyes rolled so hard I’ll have to stick to audiobooks from now on.

Art

There’s much to be said for the mark of the hand.

Importance of handwriting Berninger

“Databased-experiences”

It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.

“Aspirations get stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.”

Energy never dies. It just changes forms.

“Collect rocks
…
Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you.
…
The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.”

“We dichotomize gradients”

Now I’m getting judgy: tears up when he hears Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American”? At least this explains some things…

Learned that he lives in the greatest country on earth from two people who never left it? Explains more.

Spent the first 140 pages of this book thinking “HOW can this be the same J.D. Vance that is going to be VP for TRUMP’s Rep Party?!). Then I could pinpoint the pivot on pgs 140/141. And the pages that have followed since are an exercise in the conservative mindset of “everyone is doing life wrong, but me. If only everyone else reacted to life exactly like me.” This book is definitely not trauma-informed.

God, there are some absolutely heart shattering musings written into this book. Feels masochistic to be a parent reading this book, it is such a visceral depiction of grief.

“Agnes would like to tear it all down, rip it up, hurl it to the wind.”

I am reading this beautiful book with a lump in my throat. I’m in love with Agnes, and I’m terrified for her. Sopping up her eventual grief and feeling it so viscerally myself. I already know that, barring some literary catastrophe, this book will get five stars from me.