SLAUGHTERHOUSE 90210

Hi friends,

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wanted to share with you my most anticipated books of 2018 (through April) as a test. 

If you’re interested in what I’m reading and watching, I will update Slaughterhouse 90210 with some fun stuff. 

If not, I’ll keep going with my tinyletter. 

See what you think!

xx

“I’ve started to realize that sex qua sex has never been at the heart of my relationship issues anyway. If you’re a woman with an intimacy problem, you’re supposed to figure out how sex is to blame. That’s what magazines and pop psychology and cautionary teen dramas teach us. But the truth, for me at least, is that sex has always been the most balanced part. It’s all the other stuff that throws me off kilter and fucks with my equilibrium.”

--Erin Judge, Vow of Celibacy

“Isn’t it a strange day,” she said, “when you realize you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head? One morning, you wake up and there’s this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They’re something else that you don’t know. And they keep changing. They never stop changing on you.”

--Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

“You are a nice person, and you’re also full of anger. You’re a walking tangle of contradictions. That’s okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart.”

--Heather Havrilesky, How To Be a Person in the World

“Behind every crazy woman is a man, sitting very quietly, saying, “What? I’m not doing anything.”

--Jade Sharma, Problems

“He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should’ve known better--overeducated progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists--had no compunction explaining things to me.”

--Alexis M. Smith, Marrow Island

"People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left."

— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.”

--Emma Cline, The Girls

“There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.” ― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“Ruby was sanguine about the affair. It was a practice run. Everyone did it, whether anybody admitted it or not--almost all teenage love was a performance, with real emotions and real heartbreak. But it was a performance just the same. How else would you ever tell someone that you loved them and mean it, if you’d never said it before?”

--Emma Straub, Modern Lovers

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Aren’t friends allowed to accept each other on any terms? Unlike a marriage, a friendship could be twisted and one-sided and make no sense at all, but if it had years and years behind it, the friendship could not be discarded.”

--Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others

“Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.”

― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“His love for her was quiet and constant, familiar and soothing: it was almost its own thing entirely, like a worn rock or a set of worry beads, something he’d pick up and weigh in his palm occasionally, more comforting than dispiriting.”

--Cynthia Sweeney, The Nest

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”

― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.”

― Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati