Neda’s Reviews > The Vanishing Half > Status Update

“But I could never tell my mother any of this,” she said. “She’d just say that she was right. She cares more about being right than being my mother. Sometimes I don’t even think she likes me very much. Isn’t that something? To think your own mother can’t even stand you.”

So painful, sorry Kennedy :(((

What was the point, then, of giving a child everything? Buying books for her, enrolling her in the finest schools, hiring tutors, pleading her way into college—what was the point of any of it, if the result was only this, one bored girl gazing around a restaurant filled with some of the nation’s finest minds and playing idly with her soup?

“Your best isn’t necessarily mine,” her daughter said.
But what was Kennedy’s best, then? Stella had been shocked, and a little embarrassed, to learn that her daughter had spent the last semester on academic probation. “She’s young, she’ll figure it out,” Blake said, but Stella balked.

“I don’t know why you’re fighting it neither. What could be better than being eighteen and in love? Oh, you don’t even know. If I could go back, I’d do everything different.”

Would I? That is the question.