Genevieve’s Reviews > All Fours > Status Update

isn’t that just humanity? She’s not a stereotypical unreliable narrator because the pretense isn’t that we believe everything she’s saying and find out she’s lying—the whole point is that her emotions are the truth. Whatever she’s feeling is the truth, because really—do we ever really know? How can one be unreliable if there is nothing in the world unperceived if we’re the looking glass?

Even though half of the experience of reading this is so refreshing because none of life’s messiness is glossed over—this book is SO MESSY. Isn’t it right that even thought this sort of book makes you feel recognized in ways, isn’t it right that you want it to be cleaned up too? Sort of reminds me cmbyn, because you really cannot pass judgement of the relationships. You could call the main gal unreliable but

There is nothing fundamentally different about her, nor any of us. She’s attacking the problem at (what seems like) every angle. She’s changing every variable but herself because she feels outraged at being in her own cage, outraged at the people she feels put her there. The thing about a wandering spirit is you never have to worry about belonging anywhere

How do you belong if you can’t tell what’s making you not? The main character (does she have a name?) has all these things that are hers—a husband, a family, a job. But over none of these does she feels he has any claim over. Meanwhile Harris is begging her to stake her claim, because the way she keeps them all at arms length in killing all of them. All she wants is to be known, and yet she can’t. Why not?

“I hadn’t been angling for a special deal. My point was: what makes something yours? I guess “paying for it” was her answer.”

Oof. It’s sort of interesting how the things you’re thinking about suddenly seem to manifest in books or life. I’ve been thinking a lot about belonging—how do you belong? What makes something yours? How do you pay for it?

what a nightmare, to be stuck