You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

by Piper Weiss

What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone.

The notion of self-improvement is particular to girls and women. That perfection myth that begins with our bodies in adolescence continues to rear its head through adulthood, even when reframed as empowerment.

This is the line of women that has led to me. Each one with her own struggles and resentment, which she tried to correct with the next generation. Each time creating new struggles and resentment.