Damon’s Reviews > Birnam Wood > Status Update

Shelley often woke up the morning after a sexual encounter with a feeling of manifest exposure, as though she'd been secretly recorded in the act and the recording was now being screened, at high resolution, on her body and across her face. It was a sensation not of shame, but of transgressive near-exhilaration, and that morning she had felt it even more acutely than on the day that she'd had sex for the first time.

"The real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what's right and what's easy. They're between what's wrong and what's hard."

As he conjured her deliciously inside himself, he realized, all at once, that she would be his acquisition. She would be his venture. She would be the final piece of camouflage. Not these dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious nonentities, these small time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate.

She hated how the divorce had come to quantify her relationships with both her parents, such that one weekend dinner with her mother now placed her one weekend dinner with her father in debt, and every conversation, every holiday, every shared interest, even every congenital resemblance now felt inscribed in a vast ledger of credit and debit that somehow it was her responsibility to balance.

He in no way opposed the fundamental aims of feminism, and indeed would have welcomed, he felt sure, any well-argued point in its favor; but over the course of his twenties, he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge.

She had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable -- a fate far worse than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationships with others, but her private judgements of herself.