Black Iris

Love is not a thing we create. It's an undoing.

Love is not a thing we create. It's an undoing.

"I need the highs and the lows."

"Why did you marry [Mom]?" I asked suddenly.
"I loved her fire," he said from far away. "I didn't know I would burn."

"Why did you marry [Mom]?" I asked suddenly.
"I loved her fire," he said from far away. "I didn't know I would burn."

I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness.

In a typical college romance novel, he'd be a gorgeous but troubled sex god who'd cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I'd smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That's the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.


It's Magic Dick Lit.

I was staring at that rose-lipped mouth, then up at his eyes, a clear reddish-brown like carnelian, speckled with tiny flaws of amber and copper where the light caught.

Fuck. They're brown. His eyes are fucking brown, okay? Stop being a terrible writer, Laney.

a. Laney gets rejected at school; big fucking boo hoo. You know what? Being rejected is actually okay! People don't owe you anything, leas

a. Laney gets rejected at school; big fucking boo hoo. You know what? Being rejected is actually okay! People don't owe you anything, least of all their love, so fucking grow up. So Laney decides to be the idiot that she is and overdoses on pills and basically try to kill herself.

Her mother refuses to give her more pills as medication (to stop taking pills) which makes fucking sense because hello, remember, drugs + Laney = suicide attempt. Guess what the fuck her father calls this? Fucking child abuse.

What the actual fuck.

b. Oxycontin: Powerful prescription opioid painkiller; highly euphoric, highly expensive, highly addictive.

Basically: don't fuck around with this drug. Actually, don't fuck around with any drugs, which Laney of course does not fucking do; instead "Each day I had a breakfast smoothie of oxy, vodka, and OJ and then staggered onto the L. ”

This level of drug abuse is just not plausible for her to be "a high-functioning drug addict", despite however competent the author says Laney is with her course work.

“I swallowed another pill. Before it had time to kick in, another.
Another. Another. Another. Another.
All the way down the bottle.”

Actually, I'm just surprised she's not dead yet.

c. The worst thing is that all this consistent drug abuse in every page, in every chapter; which trivialises the fucking danger of drugs because then you wonder-

Oh, here's another seventeen/eighteen/nineteen year old scoffing down drugs more often then they go to pee- and yes drugs are bad for you everybody knows that but they're swallowing them for lunch and dinner and they aren't dead, and this slightly fucks you up because where's the moral grey line between fiction and reality now?

d. At the end, the message I get is this: It's ok to abuse drugs as long as you (try to) act like a normal person, and if somebody worries about you feel free to say “Don’t judge me. You don’t know the kind of shit I have to deal with."

Fuck you too, Laney.

a. Second page of the novel: “I was eighteen and, according to Mom, “completely out of control,” which to anyone else would have meant “a normal teenager.” ”

GIRL, SLEEPING WITH HALF OF THE SCHOOL IS NOT A NORMAL TEENAGER. NOBODY GOES AROUND SWALLOWING PILLS AND SNORTING CHEMICALS AND THINK THAT IS FINE. KIDS DON'T FUCK THINGS UP AND GET DIAGNOSED WITH BI-POLAR DISORDER. WHO THE HELL DOESN'T GET UPSET IF THEIR MOTHER DECIDE TO COMMIT SUICIDE. DOES THE AUTHOR REALLY FUCKING BELIEVE WHEN WE'RE DEPRESSED WE ABUSE OXY AND X TO "GET THE WRONGNESS OUT", WHAT THE FUCK, THAT WE WAKE UP WITH CONCUSSIONS AT THE HOSPITAL WITH OUR FATHERS CALLING US "A WALKING TIME BOMB" AND THINK THINGS LIKE I AM IN "PERFECT CONTROL OF MY SELF DESTRUCTION"??

You, Laney, are not a fucking normal teenager, and all of that is only from the first chapter.

(Also, what is it with shitty relationships with parents in YA literature? Either they're dead, or they hate each other, or the parents are somehow absent from their lives.)

b. Laney is a bitch. The book says that she has bi-polar disorder, but I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say how accurate her character is. I can definitely tell you she's a horrible bitch. If you want to read the POV from Alaska Young (Looking for Alaska) and see why she's the maniac pixie dream girl she is, Laney's life is a pretty good explanation.

- She thinks all men are either sheep or bastards (except for that one guy, cough cough)
- She thinks she knows everything, from why people are nice to her, to giving her advice because they must have An Inner Motive
- She swears at her parents *(view spoiler)[“I will not watch my daughter kill herself in my fucking house,” she said, and I snapped back, “Then I’ll do it somewhere else,” (hide spoiler)]
- She thinks everyone- no, the world owes her everything she wants
- She changes from a shy girl to one that sleeps around and getting wasted and expects her old friends to have the same relationship with her.
- She's manipulative as fuck
- She's ridiculously disrespectful of all authority
- She's also a hypocrite

Even though you may have a mental disorder, it really doesn't excuse you from your ridiculous shit. How the hell am I supposed to feel sympathetic for somebody like this?

"We're all Kafka's rider, trying to get away from ourselves.

Maybe I'm a little bitter.

And maybe this isn't your typical college romance novel."

"I was staring at that rose-lipped mouth, then

"We're all Kafka's rider, trying to get away from ourselves.

Maybe I'm a little bitter.

And maybe this isn't your typical college romance novel."

"I was staring at that rose-lipped mouth, then up at his eyes, a clear reddish-brown like carnelian, speckled with tiny flaws of amber and copper where the light caught.

Fuck. They're brown. His eyes are fucking brown, okay? Stop being a terrible writer, Laney."

"Why did you marry [Mom]?" I asked suddenly.

[...]

"I loved her fire," he said from far away. "I didn't know I would burn."

"Everything is the same. No more highs or lows. I'm in a glass box with the air pumped out. I can see, but can't taste or smell. Can't get enraged or aroused. Can't hear myself scream... I start thinking, 'What if I'm already dead? Isn't that what being dead is, the inability to feel?'"

“If I was gay,” I told the ceiling, “I wouldn’t need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn’t have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn’t say I’m ‘just a slut’ or ‘faking it’ or ‘undecided’or ‘confused.’I’m not confused. I don’t categorize people by who I’m allowed to like and who I’m allowed to love. Love doesn’t fit into boxes like that. It’s blurry, slippery, quantum. It’s only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.” I glanced at Josh. “That’s me. I’m not gay, not bi. I’m something quantum. I can’t define it.”

I am not the heroine of this story.
And I’m not trying to be cute. It’s the truth. I’m diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I’m completely dysfunctional and that’s the way I like it, so don’t expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.
Fuck forgiveness.

I am not the heroine of this story.
And I’m not trying to be cute. It’s the truth. I’m diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I’m completely dysfunctional and that’s the way I like it, so don’t expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.
Fuck forgiveness.

I’m the black iris watered by poison. The wolf that raised its head among sheep and devoured its way, ruthless and bloody, to freedom. I never forgave, never forgot.

“If you hate human connection so much, why come with us?”
Because I don’t hate it. I hate how much I need it.
Because you’re the ones I was waiting for.
Because you smell like prey.

Two girls, cherry-mouthed, glitter-lashed, our skin luminous with moonlight and sweat, making out beneath pennants that still shivered with the afternoon’s boy bravado.
If only you bastards could see me now.

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral.

“I never wanted to be saved. I wanted someone to follow me down into the darkness.”

“I am not the heroine of this story."

“Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.”

“Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.”

“Maybe all you need to pull you back form the ledge is to know someone would miss you if you fell.”