The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.

When Wollstonecraft said that a woman will be crucified for aiming at respect instead of love, she must have meant at the hands of the very man who is supposed to love her . . .’

‘Though I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of the world, but less. To take oneself out of it.

Someone else’s sentences, twisting, turning, moving, as all things must, towards their own ends. Sometimes where they take you is right to your own bewildered heart.

How true it is that ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation.

‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’

I’ll have put them off me, as so often happens when you speak the truth. It’s the reason so many do not.

And the jurors, the judge, all of you, are men, made loose by balls and bragging, with no earthly notion how tight it can get inside a woman’s skin.