More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This was the problem with being friends with someone who knew you when you were a teenager. They never quite take you seriously because they always see you as your stupid teenage self.
Right?!
Or perhaps her mother was right and she should be frightened for her own safety: Maybe she was Saskia’s target. Ellen’s mother would be so cross if Ellen ended up dead.
She believed in grief over death and joy over birth and love and marriage and plain wholesome food and a spick-and-span house. Anything else was just “being silly.”
I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin.
should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways,
I was stunned. I’m not sure why. I think I just never expected him to be important enough to make any significant changes in his life, but of course, he doesn’t know that he’s only a minor character in my life. He’s the star of his own life and I’m the minor character. And fair enough too.
It would not do to throw up over Colleen’s grave. She looked around. If worse came to worst, she would quickly scoot over to Bill Taylor’s grave. He was “of tender heart and generous spirit,” so perhaps he wouldn’t mind.
He was just one of those nice, friendly people who liked everyone. It made sense. The nice people next door would know other nice people. They tend to congregate.
Surely a gentle suggestion during an enjoyable hypnosis session was better than nagging or yelling or manipulating him with sex. That was so 1950s.
They’d been in a relationship for less than a year, and already they had so many routines, customs and procedures. It was like each new couple created a new kingdom together.
The suffragettes didn’t starve themselves for the vote so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man. —Ellen’s
Since having a stepson, she’d done a lot of ninja fighting.
Girl, same.
as my mother used to call certain ladies from our church: the ones with saintly smiles who dropped off casseroles and bags of secondhand clothes but were always too busy being charitable to other needy folk to accept Mum’s offer of a cup of tea. I’ve always blamed those women for my godlessness.
