“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”

“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

Holy shit.

This was such an unexpected amazing read. I am so grateful to be in a world with writers like this I feel like she took all the things I’d wondered and felt and magnified them and made them pretty and gruesome.

I’m going to need to think more but highly recommend.

This is like the Barbie monologue but so much better.

“You’re a woman, and it’s your job to fade into the background. It’s your job to make sure your children love their father and never know what a fucking idiot he is, or how little he is capable of accomplishing without you. You’re a woman, and it’s your job to have it all but never complain about how heavy it is to carry. You’re a woman, so you must strive to achieve, even if those achievements will drive the envy that means you will always be disparaged and never be embraced. You’re a woman, and you were put here to suffer and feel pain, or so people will say, and so they will act, and so you will never be properly treated and your borne-in aches will never be taken for the fatal blows that they are. You are a woman, and so the transgressions against you will always be justified in some way by what you wore or what you said or who you are, and everything bad that happens to you will always somehow be deserved. Unless you die a martyr, for your children, which is the only sure way to be a Good Woman. Because then, when you are dust and unexamined, important only for the act of ending, you will finally have the honor of being a saint.”

“Because I am looking for a great love, one that can bring the gods to their knees, and spin the earth off its axis.”

“Was Alex’s success by traditionally masculine markers less significant than Caroline’s success by traditionally feminine ones?”

“Besides,” Fawn added, raising a glass of lemonade to her lips as she lowered her voice, “can’t exactly do illicit things in the carport with my Little Sis, can I?”

The tension here and in this book in general of is it a gay crush or a girl crush is amazing.

“How long do we have to settle for ‘equally warmongering but not actively a bigot’?”

“To eat among women unencumbered by shame was the actual delicious part, although the cake had admittedly been gluttonous.”

“But nobody ever asked how much are you willing to suffer. They only asked what do you want.”

This exploration of motherhood is really interesting to me, as a new foster mom to teens it’s so weird how these things still resonate with me even though I didn’t birth them and they’re not infants but yet I still feel the push and pull of being my own person and being their foster mom.

“But of course Nina didn’t have a crush. It wasn’t a crush. She was in danger. She was in love.”

“Then she went to her office because just because a person is a monster doesn’t mean they don’t have bills to pay.”