Keira’s Reviews > Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason > Status Update

“Or maybe I wanted to wind the clock back even further: to have never met my lover at all; to have never stood close enough in his proximity to understand that everything that had ever passed as intimacy or desire in me in all the decades of my adulthood had been only a facsimile of something, the polite version, the academic signifier rather than the hurricane signified.”

“It was the season I realized we never really know what another person is capable of, or has secretly yearned for or done.”

“What came to characterize us most, even when we were laughing, even when celebrating holidays, or on vacation, even as we stood, our arms around each other posting for photographs that presented a curated image of family, were the things we didn’t talk about, the things never said.” Growing up in one angry, dysfunctional family, just to ultimately create another. Ouch.

I dwell in the relative peace of my frantic, overly busy life for the last time, before descending into the throes of both grief and feral lust: a dangerous state for a woman, one that makes her feel self-immolating and invincible. I watch us all shoot brief and bright against the same vast sky one last time. Vibrant, singular, miraculously ordinary, full of love and pain we flash. Then, one by one, we are out.