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Pierre Fayol was a local commander of the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI) in the Haute-Loire region. During the war, he was fiercely chauvinistic, hated taking orders from a woman, and mockingly called Hall "the ginger witch". After the war, however, he felt immense remorse. He spent a decade of his life writing reports, gathering files, and passionately campaigning to get her achievements recognized.

In the secret CIA report of her career, the CIA admitted that her fellow officers "felt she had been sidelined – shunted into backwater accounts because she had so much experience that she overshadowed her male colleagues, who felt threatened by her," and that "her experience and abilities were never properly utilized."

Mozak- saved countless Allied agents and downed airmen trapped in Nazi-occupied France.
Baker Street- the headquarters of Britain's Special Operations Executive).
Despite her massive success, her identity and contributions remained a secret from the general public for a long time due to wartime security.

Chp 5: After the liberation of France, Baker Street finally acknowledged the true extent of Virginia Hall’s contribution to a very great number of escapes, but most of all Mozak, an internal F-section memorandum (21 Nov. 1944), recorded for posterity, “Many of our men owe their liberty and even their lives to Virginia Hall.” But the world outside never knew.

Chp 2: Wearing her beloved trousers was now out of the question, as Vichy blamed them for the female emancipation that had enthralled Virginia in prewar Paris but which equated to dangerous moral turpitude. (1941-42)

In any case, I had to die someday. Even if I’d led a normal life like the women before I would have still found myself at the dawn of the last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying at least they’d known real life. And I was very jealous of them. But they died. Like I’m about to die. And what does having lived mean when you are no longer alive?

I’m about 1/3 of the way through. It is definitely giving Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Chp 47: kids aren’t resilient. Why do people say they are? Because people can learn resilience. They learn resilience by feeling safe. By having time to bounce back and recover. So that’s what we can do for the kids. By giving them safety.

Chp 47: “Kids are resilient” “They’re not, dad! Kids aren’t resilient. That’s what adults like to say to make themselves feel better. To pretend that kids don’t feel as deeply as adults do. But kids are everything that happens to them. They’re sponges. Everything bad, everything good. Every hurtful thing you say. Every loving one.”

Day 4: Friday: Chapter 31
Sophie was so pissed at her father, but also, somehow it was reassuring that he was still drinking. That he couldn’t change. He would die before he could change. so Sophie shouldn’t bother hoping for him to be any different than he was. She was off the hook. She didn’t need to hope anymore. Because it was hopeless. Sophie had prepared herself for her father’s death so many times.

Chapter 2: Always get married in May, it ensured anniversaries full of peonies, and ranunculus, and anemones. The room might as well have been a cutting garden.

Part 1 Chp 1: “…the elderly sculpture, a true believer since deceased, had a tendency to confer bulging eyes on her subjects as a sign of their pious fervor. Her bust of Aunt Helena looks rabid. That of Aunt Vidala looks hyperthyroid, and that of Aunt Elizabeth looks ready to explode.”

Chp 16 Europe:As soon as the last goodbyes were said, the load of care, anxiety, & responsibility which I had carried for 18 years began to lift itself from my shoulders at a rate of a pound a minute.It was the first time I had felt free from care, & my feeling of relief?It is hard to describe on paper.Added to this was the delightful anticipation of being in Europe soon.It all seemed more like a dream than reality.

Chp 11: Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of people watching them fail. The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit it is from the people who judge you from having not succeeded.

Chp 2: Pres. Franklin Pierce made history by becoming the first president to recite his inaugural address (3,319 words) by memory. With a desire to put the simmering slavery debate to rest, he opened with, "It is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself."

Chp 2: You already know that the US was wrenched in two because of slavery, and only barely knitted back together if anyone tries to tell you that the Civil War was a war for states’ rights, calmly look them in the eye and ask, politely, & inquisitively what exactly the states wanted the right to do. Make their own rules about what? The answer is, of course, that they wanted the right to keep enslaved people

Chp 8: Memories and feelings coexist in a close relationship. They’ll lie to you if it means they can stay together.

This was fun to read

Chp 40: “Let us out,” said Carol. “We will look where we need to look. Find what we need to find. And once we figured out who the murderer is, I’ll invite you to the denouement and you can make the arrest.”
“Denouement?”
“It’s the bit at the end of the story when you find out who the killer is and everything gets wrapped up. let us out and I promise it will be along very soon.”

Chp 39: Carol clenched at the mention of the place. She never considered herself a class warrior, live and let live. Some of my best pals are poshos, but the mention of that particular school rubbed her the wrong way. She’d seen a TV documentary once and the juxtaposition of some of the most bulliable children she had ever seen and their inpenetrable confidence made her a little sick in the mouth.

Chp 2: The trouble was as soon as you told someone that you were once a serial killer, it was all day to think about. It was crazy. They couldn’t ever seem to get past it. Carol would be standing there talking about how she used to like pork, but now she found it too fatty. Or how there never seemed to be anything on the TV anymore, or how she had heard that Americans don’t call Lego Lego, but Legos.

Part 6 Chap 2: a lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old

Chp 35: It is another of life‘s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with each other. I wonder if on this side of heaven, either one can be complete without the other.

Chp 35: Theo, I appreciate that you are such a sensitive man. You have a tender heart.
Not tender, Asher. Broken. My expertise with sadness is hard earned. But I realize more and more that it is a gift. Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there.

Chp 26 While Mrs. Ocie Van Blarcum fit in comfortably in the highbrow world of St. James, she was no stranger to the soup lines and homeless shelters in Golden. She and Ellen had seen each other often in such places. She understood the difference between troubled mind and troublemaker. And she recognized in Ellen all the signs of the former. A wounded soul, a lost sheep, a “least of these.”

Chp 26 Mrs. Ocie Van Blarcum was a matriarch of St. James, a venerated and lifelong member whose family name was empaneled in a grand window that covered most of the sanctuary’s west wall. She knew well and lived devotedly the ethic of James “faith without works is dead” she was not merely capable of saintliness, she was saintly. Some would have argued that she was a saint.

Part 1 Chp 3: He kissed the infant’s fluffy skull and said, “I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me,” for what is the point of having children if each generation does not improve what went before?

This was a quick reread. I started at the beginning and then skipped to the middle and continued to the end from there. I had a few questions after reading When He Was Wicked

We need to ask better questions. Does this woman have help? time? space to reconnect with herself? Because desire is something we have to make room for. Desire is non-binary. Desire is a relational experience. It thrives in environments of safety, curiosity, tenderness, and mutual care. When those conditions begin to erode, through fatigue or resentment, desire doesn’t necessarily disappear, it just gets quieter.

Cp 11: In truth, many cases of low libido aren’t just about hormones, they are about context. They are about a life that has crowded out autonomy and rest.