Hailey Telfer > Recent Status Updates

The novels rotate between descriptions of designer clothing, Les Mis references, work-out and skincare routines, stream-of-consciousness drug and alcohol induced madness, slasher descriptions, and existential longing on the part of its soulless Wall Street bros. It’s well-written, despite, or perhaps because of its repetitious cycle. It’s empty and devoid and quite effectively depressing.

"Breach is an I say it again alien power, and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We've simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a-apologies if I offend, but —a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier."

At first Ripley argues that to get out of conflict we should listen to one another openly, a sort of simple, naive, well-intended argument. But when she tells the story of Curtis, a former gang member, different contours appear: avoid high conflict people, get space and time from conflict, and then, after progress toward an alternative path, you might be able to see the bigger picture and become a better listener.

So far this is very utopian. The books presents the idea that “us vs. them” is the problem, that political binaries such as the two-party system are tearing us apart, that we need to listen to one another and not dig our heels in. It’s true, and good advice, but also quite simple. The ideal solution is that both sides listen to one another, which feels impossible. But I’ll keep reading.

“‘Are you asking if poetry has something to do with the soul?’ asked one student.
‘I suppose so, though the soul can mean something nonreligious.’
‘I don't think there's a fixed relation between the two,’ the student continued. ‘If that were the case, wouldn't poetry always be about ethics?’
‘Determining what's worthy of reverence or poetic observation is an ethical judgment,’ I said.

It’s feeling less like satire and more like The Bell Jar.

Atmosphere, drama, and grit

Still enthralled. Like Station Eleven but with more energy and creativity. Like Brave New World but with well-written women. A hefty dose of a life on every page. Weird, wonderful prose and story.

I picked this up because of the first paragraph—I love this kind of prose: creative, inventive, a bit strange

Struggling. I’m reading this directly after a lovely experience reading Dorian Gray. Though Perfume is similar in prose and theme, it’s no intellectual match to Wilde’s masterpiece. Suskind does have a talent for olfactory imagery, though, and it’s remarkable how many different ways he can describe humankind’s experiences with scent.

"I am of course, as I said, afraid to try writing on my own, because of the huge possibilities of failure."

I just finished the section at Smith college, before Plath disappears and attempts suicide. She was so hard on herself. The higher she climbed, the more pressure she put on herself to create and to achieve. At times she calls herself a tigress, and I believe she was, a tigress gnawing, attacking herself.

I am sick, in bed, reading and thinking about Sylvia Plath, because that is what one does in October.

I am struck by the originality of Plath’s mind. I wish we had her others works, I wish we had another novel, more poetry. I wish she had never met Ted Hughes and I wish she had lived.

"Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated, rather than prescribed."

"Trees are an invitation to think about time, and to travel in it, the way they do--by standing still, and reaching out and down. If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens."

In all seriousness though, I am entertained. Conroe writes a highly believable contemporary millennial guy. For me it's similar to the other writers of "now" that I've read, but from a male perspective. See: Raven Leilani, Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, Halle Butler, Naoise Dolan. Conroe's narrator is insufferable, but he must be getting at something here...

In all seriousness though, I am entertained. Conroe writes a highly believable contemporary millennial guy. For me it's similar to the other writers of "now" that I've read, but from a male perspective. See: Raven Leilani, Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, Halle Butler, Naoise Dolan. There's something similar happening here. Conroe's narrator is insufferable, but he must be getting at something here...

I picked up this book without any knowledge of the controversy surrounding it, and without reading any Goodreads reviews. This book is obviously about a miserable, self absorbed millennial guy I dated in my BFA writing program, right? The guy who had all the support behind him, the money, the intelligence, and sneered at everyone? Who thought he was above writing, even though he was a writer? Oh wait...

Definitely a lot more than a story about a "bad mom." It's a story about a person who was up against everything, rebelling and edging and pushing her whole life, constantly walking the line between life and death in the desert.

"He went outside and looked at the sky. It was raining stars. He was sorry, because he would rather have seen a tranquil sky. He heard roosters crowing. He felt the mantle of night covering the earth. The earth, this vale of tears."

Listening to this as an audiobook and enjoying it so far. Watkins has a very sharp, funny, and accessible voice. Her narrator is certainly a bit misanthropic, a bit cynical, but her story and background is so well developed. More than anything, I've enjoyed listening to her talk about her childhood, scraping by in the dessert with a creative and misunderstood, overlooked mother, and a dead ex-Manson father.

“Nonfiction is, at its best, an act of putting the world back together, or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions, and in this sense, creation and destruction.”

“These politics contaminated Kerouac’s On the Road for me. I got as far as the protagonist’s encounter with Terry, who he calls “a dumb little Mexican wench with a simple and funny mind.” And then the protagonist takes off and leaves her. The woman is a stationary object... Halfway through, I put the novel down. The book was going to go on without people like me, and I was going to go on without it.”

“Images of levitation arose unbidden... Could I have [a body] too ethereal to be part of the clashes on the surface of the earth? ...I could still see and feel myself rising up to the level of the streetlamp, outside my apartment, hovering in the halo of light... safe not just from predators but from the laws of physics, the rules governing human bodies... from the weight of all those fears and that hate.”

“I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzling alive, and that a joyous confidence, now rare, would be common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult, to impossible.”

"You are, in your youth, walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose another route. You are making something: a life, a self. And, it is an intensely creative task, as well as one it is more than impossible to fail—a little, a lot, miserably, fatality. Youth is a high-risk business.”