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Kindle Notes & Highlights
It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one’s will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it.
‘How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.’
there’s more than one bloody way to live: one in four households are single, most of the royal family are single, the nation’s young men have been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there’s a whole generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don’t need to wash anyone else’s socks.
Oh God. Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Why? Why? Why is entire world geared to make people not
involved in romance feel stupid when everyone knows romance does not work anyway.
As I went to the till to pay, I was thinking it all over and trying, as a feminist, to see Mum’s point of view.
Either go out with me and treat me nicely, or leave me alone. As I say, I am not interested in fuckwittage.’
The thought of going home, putting my nighty on and turning on the telly began to seem irresistibly attractive.
‘But you don’t go round wearing your commitment problem on your sleeve like every bloody man over the age of twenty does these days.’
It’s no good. When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you’ve created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts which adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love.
at certain times in your life everything goes wrong and you
don’t know which way to turn and it is as if everywhere around you stainless steel doors are clamping shut like in Star Trek. What you have to do is be a heroine and stay brave, without sinking into drink or self-pity and everything will be OK. And that all the Greek myths and many successful movies are all about human beings facing difficult trials and not being wimps but holding hard and thus coming out on top.
