Nerissa Muthayan’s Reviews > Girlhood > Status Update

“I wanted to take it all back. How much are you supposed to tell someone who loves you that much, who you want to protect? Is it worse for them to find out later, when you’re safely on the other side?.……Lies make fools of the people we love. It’s a careful equation, protecting them at the cost of your betrayal. Like mortgaging the house again to pay for the car.”

“By my early twenties, I had already undergone a long education in this. I had suffered the consequences of all the ways I could not or did not control how I appeared to men. I had implanted that gaze inside myself. I had tried to suppress my animal nature, to change the shape of my body, to erase myself in a hundred ways, to give men exactly what they wanted, and none of it had worked.”

“There is a part of me that still can’t bear to see it in other women—the slut you are bent on becoming—that shimmer, that man-sourcing of self, that vaporous need to please, to fill the invisible belly with the thing they told us was food. It hurts to look at them, and even I feel a twinge of that muddy desire: to punish them, to prevent them, to protect them.”