The Shampoo Effect Quotes

“She just bobbed along through life, making dumb f***ing decisions, keeping so cool all the time, emotionally distant and above the fray, never realizing how much she actually cared until it was way too late.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this, and the way it applied to so many interpersonal dynamics - the way that in these old relationships nobody was ever really working from a clean slate, new feelings were built on old feelings.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“That’s not interesting, it’s horror! It’s like Demi Moore in The Substance!” “Does a bug bite her in that?” “Worse. She internalizes society’s pressure for women to conform to beauty standards!”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She had been so used to feeling the full force of Van’s care, manifested with oil changes for her car, cups of coffee delivered to her desk, waterproofing spray for her boots—Van’s love language being, obviously, “acts of service”—that she was startled by the shift. When he did come over, they made out and drank wine and watched movies at her cottage, but she noticed he kept looking at his phone, and when she peered over his shoulder, she saw he was just scrolling through pictures of Dylan, looking at a shared photo site Bailey had made for her friend group. It was better than catching her boyfriend on Tinder, but only barely.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Ospreys mate for life,” Van said earnestly. “Well, unless they fail to produce chicks after two seasons.” “Then the male osprey joins a gym, gets on Hinge, and finds a teenager with daddy issues.” Caroline nodded.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“as all writers must, she contemplated law school.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Maybe most people sought out that kind of unconditional love in romantic partners”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“There was a line somewhere between the kind of fun that made you feel alive and the kind of fun that inconvenienced everyone around you.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She discovered that her relationship to caffeine was as emotional as it was physical,”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“RJ would stay out all night celebrating. He would drink and smoke and arrive home in an Uber long after midnight, covered in grease and seawater and probably somebody else’s tutu. And while he did that, Fran would run the laundry, would bathe the boys, would turn on nightlights, and would check under beds for monsters, because that was her job, and she felt it harden like a pit in her stomach—to put up with the bullshit, to clean up the mess, and to take care of everyone but herself.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“And my friends all smell like weed or little babies. —Taylor Swift, “Florida!!!”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Augusta knew, better than anyone, how hard it was to raise a child when the dad was off fucking someone else.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“The food produced and then wasted in the United States generates more greenhouse gas emissions than thirty-seven million cars.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“I’m always having these moments where I’m about to lose my shit in the cereal aisle”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran decided that being mistaken for a sex worker was a universal part of the female experience”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“RJ would stay out all night celebrating. He would drink and smoke and arrive home in an Uber long after midnight”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“She couldn’t think of the last time her brother had texted her just to be nice. He only ever wanted things from her.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“publishing a book was sort of like getting to experience your own funeral.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“strangely alarming about what it meant to be the female in any species—”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“There should be a law against telling anyone bad news when they didn't have on a bra.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“But my point is that once you have kids you can’t make your own rules, because you’re taking care of your children for twenty years in the middle of your life, you’re stuck with whoever you decided to co-parent with, and then one day you wake up and the kids are gone and sure, you can be yourself again, whatever that even means, but will you even know who that is anymore?”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“They said he was having “big feelings.” That never really went away”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran thought about the shampoo effect at moments like this”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“all of them strangely alarming about what it meant to be the female in any species—the female octopus laying her clutch of eggs and then slipping off to a cave to starve”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“Fran organized the kitchen, having an engineer’s logic for the placement of cooking utensils and glasses, Van tackled the lighting fixtures, the television, the speakers, and all the electronics, and Bailey did the bedrooms, unrolling rugs, hanging clothes in the closets, and making up the beds with her best hospital corners, a skill she had learned entirely from watching reality shows about yachting.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“but the children greeted each other with the extravagance of astronauts returned from space, falling all over one another and hugging, dropping buckets and towels and blocking the ramp for anyone else trying to get past, and so Augusta herded them all over to the benches so they could carry on with minimal obstruction.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“It’s sad that in this day and age he didn’t feel comfortable just coming out. But also, how could she have missed it? It was her own husband…”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“The fact that he had been with a man felt like an implicit rejection, or a double-layered deceit. He had hidden more than a relationship, but some part of himself. And she had shared everything with him, even the hard and shameful bits.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect

“It was embarrassing to know that everyone in Greenhead was talking about her, but Augusta refused to stay home and hide. She wanted, years from now, for her children to look back and see a mother who had remained stoic in the face of humiliation, like Princess Diana going off and walking in fields of land mines after Charles dumped her for Camilla.”
― Jenny Jackson, The Shampoo Effect