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Oh frick this is gonna be good isn’t it

Miriam Toews: I’m gonna write a bunch of books about depressed and darkly humorous Mennonites
Me: worry not MT I will read them ALL

She was not a collection of veins and vessels, cells and bones. Except they all were. They would live fewer years than this tree, and the earth would disassemble them. Jane was already just a cup full of ash.

Abashed the Devil stood;
And felt how awful goodness is.

So I didn’t plan to read this bc I wasn’t impressed with shadow and bone, but this one is much better. Characters are more fleshed out and interesting, there’s more of them instead of just one main, I think the writing is better and it’s pretty funny. I see what everyone sees now! I still think her world building is unoriginal but I can deal with that.

This book is not, in any way, brief.

Okay, I know it took me 7 years to read this book but it’s still worth reading based on the essay about The Help alone.

Oh, they’re also different from other fundamentalists in that they don’t evangelize- since they’re Calvinist, that’s God’s job.

This is so different than any of the conservative Christians I’ve ever known. Women can work because how else will they accomplish their mission if everyone isn’t working in high powered careers? The guilt for hugging a boy is familiar, but being told that you might never have a husband or wife because the lord might not want you to is different. Although when everyone you attend church with is related to you...

Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.

There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

I’m not even sure I had a personality back then; I just tried to haphazardly arrange other people’s projections and shit I thought was cool into something captivating.

“I don’t want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I had learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge. I do not want to be fixed. I want to change the world. I want to be alive, awake, grieving and full of joy. And I am.”

I resonated with the essay about femme care work. I’m not disabled and I’m white and straight so most of this book is learning from other perspectives for me, but in this one I saw myself.

I loved the part about bitterness and rage at people wanting access because no one ever gave you ancestors access. “But I believe our beloved dead want us to do more than life on one cracker and an inaccessible building, forever.”

It seemed to him that he could never get a proper grip on any of the beauty in this world.

It’s not about self care- it’s about collective care. Shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, come late, have needs. Leaving no one behind.

Quoting another healer when she says “if we let ourselves be caught up in the discussion of self-care we are missing the whole point of healing justice work... too often self-care in our organizational culture gets translated to our individual responsibility... we do all that self care to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.”

“He put his arm around her and said blessings on you, girl, and she told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary (Uncle Frank has obviously never been a woman).”

“Public enemy number one for these women was a girl with a book.”

“Public enemy number one for these women was a girl with a book.”

I’m not a huge fan of all the different euphemisms for virginity/sexual debut, or for genitals, but this book is about career sex workers 100 years ago so it comes with the territory. I still love you Amy Tan.

Hey, Father. How come you quit trying to convert me?
I didn’t want to have to baptize you.
How come?
I’d have to sponsor you. Promise to stand between you and the devil. But there is no space, nowhere to stand.

“Unabridged dictionaries have about them a stern, immutable air, as if here the language has been captured once and for all, and yet from the day of publication they are inescapably out of date.”

This book is DARK but it is also, as the youths say, A Mood. Is Vermont Gothic a thing, because I feel like this is it.

FRICK this book is good!!!

“Cricket did not remember but that did not matter because someone else did. She was not the only one carrying the story of her life. That’s what she needed her parents to be, more than caregivers: keepers of the selves she had grown out of.”

Reading a book set in the 1970’s and thinking: you know, a lot of these problems could be solved with the invention of cell phones or texting. But then we wouldn’t have the book, now would we.

“Cities today talk about bringing back the middle class, as if nobody were in the middle class until he had left the city and acquired a ranch house and a barbecue and thereby become precious.”