hailey zipfel > Recent Status Updates

"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.”

“Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention.”

“Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.”

Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights parted the curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the garden, gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay's simple certainty...

"Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad."

Three hours into the audiobook and I have no idea what is going on. Going to start this again and read it with my eyes, instead.

“‘Can I take your coat?’ Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.”

I love Creepy Doll, Cupcake, Vignette, and the Duchess. And why haven’t I been invited to a Smut Salon yet?!

So far, Melania Housekeeper is my favorite character. I would also be repulsed if an “Artificial Friend” started hanging around where I work.

“The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers”

And without generalities, hateful identities, and dream narratives, what is one left with?

“I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through the marshes; precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon light of the Grange. And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions, than even for one night abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again.”

“I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills…”