Chloe > Recent Status Updates

“Can you imagine it? I’d say to them. Can you imagine me there in the front row of Saint Peter’s Square? The lesbian sister of a literal saint.”

“Jordan sounds like the kind of girl you divorce” - if a man said this about me I’d make it my Instagram bio.

“I tried not to hate people. Hating people was too tiring. But sometimes, just sometimes, it was hard.”

“These are good questions, but we may as well ask a plane tree, Why can’t you keep your leaves in winter? or ask a wasp, Why weren’t you born more useful, like a honeybee?”

“There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.”

“We’re always trying to own men we don’t got no control of. I’m tired of it. Tired of having to be out here thinking about all these people, all these things to keep me alive, keep them alive. I don’t got no air left for none of it.”

“It was like something had come over the building and they all scattered, women disintegrating into nothing.”

“Watching him, I don’t think anybody but Trevor and me understand what it’s like to feel ourselves moving, like really notice it. Sometimes I think this little kid might just save me from the swallow of our gray sky, but then I remember that Marcus used to be that small, too, and we’re all outgrowing ourselves.”

“Airport, car door, buy a shower curtain, get divorced.”

“Elf and I came home from somewhere and found two large bullets on the kitchen table. We had asked our mother why they were there and she said one of her clients had asked her to keep them for her so she wouldn’t be tempted to fire them into her head. But how could she fire two bullets into her own head? Elf asked. The other one was for her daughter, our mother said. So she wouldn’t be leaving her alone.”

“It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.”

“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

This book is going to wreck me.

I’m going to start calling people “bawbags”

Douglas Stuart is a beautiful writer

I was not expecting this to open with a detailed fisting scene, but I suppose that’s what you get when you let lesbians write books.