By Any Other Name

by Jodi Picoult

“Life as a woman is not without risks,” the

A secret prayer, for a forbidden religion. Like the other converso Jews who had come from Spain and Italy, the Bassanos were Christians now in the eyes of the world, attending church and praying to the Virgin and her Blessed Son. People saw what they wanted to see.

We are all actors, cara.

“It’s being judged constantly. For your clothes. For your curves. It’s being told every time you turn on the TV that you have to be thinner or more beautiful. It means doing the same job as a man and getting paid less for it. It means if you age naturally you’re letting yourself go, and if you get work done, you’re trying too hard.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Being a woman means being told to speak up for yourself in one breath, and to shut up in the next. It means fighting all the fucking time.”

if you didn’t put yourself out there to be rejected, you couldn’t get hurt.

How charmed a life: to play at being a woman yet take off the costume at the end of the day and go about the world with the privileges of a man.

“Yes, but do women ever write the plays?” He blinked at her, and then laughed. “Emilia, you never fail to entertain.”

“Dad, I should have been here.” “You absolutely should not have been here. If you were, it would mean I’d have failed as a parent. You have a life now, and you’re supposed to be living it.”

What if, Melina wondered, this was how change began—one mind at a time?

You could remove your heart, and still feel its broken pieces rattling inside.

He watched her reach for her own kirtle. Emilia barely had to tug before the fabric ripped. After so much loss, the seam gave easily, as if grief were already part of its weave.

“Even the villains are the heroes of their own stories,”

She swallowed. “Then wait till you hear about his two left arms. See how the picture makes it look like his arm is attached backward? Some people believe that’s a hint that this whole folio is a deception. No right arm. No write arm. Get it?”

If you want to create something that men cannot dismantle,” she said, letting the ball fly, “you must beat them at their own game.”

“Escape may not be possible in my lifetime. Mayhap I am like that bird, beating against the window for naught. But you—or your daughter, or your daughter’s daughter—may be the one to fly through the hole.”

What do you say when you know your words will be your last? I was here. I mattered.

“Very few of us get the lives we wish for,” Emilia said.

Even as the tree’s branches were dragged low by wind or rain or ice, it never broke. It gave, just enough, to survive.

They were the hands of a woman who had worked hard to survive.

They had clawed her to safety, grabbed at wishes, mixed and baked and bleached and swept, shaken and soothed, held her son and her son’s son, bled ink. They told her story.

Emilia considered this. Facts, seen from different angles, could be dismissed as fictions, and vice versa. There was a reason you could not create history without writing the word story.

The poetry would last. The poet would not.

There once was a girl who became invisible so that her words might not be.