My mother left school after the eighth grade, as her six sisters and one brother had done, in order to go to work. Yet our house was filled with books.
Her grandiosity is not enough to cover her shame and the fantasy that she will be regarded as a princess does not truly mitigate the fact that she works like a chambermaid.
My fears and anxieties have taught me that even if they can't be entirely overcome, they can be faced and sometimes outwitted. For that knowledge, I am grateful.
It doesn't go away, but if you work at it, usually with a good therapist, feelings of being a fake come less often, pass more swiftly, and do less damage.
Kale is overrated. Don't kid yourself. It's a fad. Next we'll be eating plankton, and they'll be telling us to sieve it through our teeth like whales. Have coffee and a bagel.
They'd fallen for a young woman who appeared to be the most independent, self-sufficient, assertive and self-confident girl they'd ever met. I was all that--but only in public.
This is what women look like when we're really laughing, I thought. This was me, and us, all those years ago. This is me, and us, still. What a luxury.
The way that other Doomsday Preppers might line their cellars with canned goods, gallons of water, boxes of batteries, and cans of Spam, I'm stockpiling every book ever written.
We have laws to update our "Do Not Call" lists because we don't want to have our privacy violated. So how is it an imposition to make sure people ask erotic partners for consent?
It was only after my uncle died that I found a photograph of him and Fred dressed as Rhett and Scarlett; Fred was a coy Vivian Leigh and my uncle a smiling Clark Gable.
"Parenthood is a contagious disease," Jeff Terry observes. "It's like smoking. Even though we can witness, firsthand, the devastation caused by parenting, it spreads.”
Romance can be a form of narcotic for a certain kind of woman, and Emma Bovary is the embodiment of the woman whose life can be shattered by too heavy a dependence on fantasy.
