Joyce’s Reviews > The Name Curse > Status Update

It wasn’t as if the house was a prison for those memories, and if she escaped it, they would all vanish when someone new took it over and repainted the walls.

She’d still had those memories in Alaska when she’d talked to Matthew about her dad. Or when she thought about selling the house.

I thought you didn’t want to remember him.

What? How could I forget him?

Somehow it was these annoying, random things you missed about people. Not necessarily his smile or the shine of his eyes. How he annoyed her by messing up her hair and calling her Ragamuffin.

She felt marooned on the sofa. Her personal Gilligan’s Island in her own home.

The particular bouquet of the hospital, the cleaning products, the sterility - even the burnt electrical smell of those bright-@$$ lights seemed to be stuck in his nose.

If there’s anything TV has taught me, it’s that you have to talk about these things. That’s why shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” have been on for a hundred years. It’s just people and their problems. It’s cathartic.

Sometimes he’d wished he had been abusive so he’d have concrete reasons to hate him. Hating someone for being pathetic was harder. It felt less legitimate.

I like the foresight you had. “Let me commit all my crimes before I turn eighteen so my record is clean.”

At least chocolate pudding, you can pretend it’s mousse … But those weird tapioca balls? They’re unnatural.

Yeah, and why do people drink it? Like, take a sip and then this giant mucous-like ball slides down your throat on purpose?

The sterile white walls of the hospital were such a weird contrast to her life the past several days. … The brightest lights she’d ever seen, even though she’d essentially been in terminal sunshine nonstop. It was all so constructed and electronic …