More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alana Massey
The truth about the women who are forced to play these interesting chapters is that they are doing so in the memoirs of men who never deserved them.
To this day, even as Sylvia is long dead by her own hand, her cautionary tale is not about lives poorly lived but about feelings too earnestly expressed.
Those who dare to document their lived experience as worthwhile are brave new girls indeed. As brightly as these girls shine, there remain wet blankets around every corner attempting to extinguish the flames in their hearts. They are dismissed as excessively feminine and juvenile, two words that mean the same thing in the hearts and minds of critics who would sooner praise a six-volume gaze at a Norwegian man’s navel than consider the possibility that there are treasures in the hearts of girls.
Young girls are smarter than they’re given credit for, and more resilient, too. They like what they like for good reason. They seek to build kingdoms out of their favorite people and things, and there is a certain subset of girls, even today, who have made Sylvia their icon-elect.
The reputation of young girls for “wearing their hearts on their sleeves” is one that is discussed more often as unwittingly sharing too much information, rather than framing them as active agents making decisions on how best to publicly express themselves.
had been following his social media accounts, knowing full well that despite the existence of the term “ghosting” that we now have for abandoning romantic interests without a word, he was, quite unfortunately, not at all dead.
These girls create heaping monuments to pain and subsequently gain impressive followings that suggest the world is every bit as heartbroken as we’ve suspected all along.
With all that smiling she did in photos, she struck me as the kind of woman who didn’t want to cause a lot of trouble except when she was ready to cause nothing short of a disaster.
that, of course, is the plight of the feeling girl: to be told again and again that her very existence is something not worth declaring.
“In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” she confesses, a rare and raw admission of how much we sometimes crave the opportunity to crawl into the arms of men who cannot or choose not to love us as fully as we do them.
“I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.”
reaching out to others enduring suffering and nonsense in a world that tells them their hearts are burdens rather than treasures.
And they know they are not drawn to the bulb at the back of the oven, but by the flare signals sent out by their fellow travelers.
We were the kind of girls who fantasized about looking beautiful at our funerals instead of our weddings. But we were not girls who especially wanted to die.
Women who venture to do the same are ridiculed as fakers and try-hards; their constructed identities are seen as attention-seeking stunts more than new embodiments of the artists themselves.
ghoulishly demanding that she be like her father who died instead of the woman who insisted on living.
tried to accept Courtney as the girl with the most cake for years, silently complicit in narratives that dismiss female rage as symptomatic of a juvenile character rather than the logical response to a hostile world.
There is a peripheral woman who finds an important man. She looks at him longingly despite any apparent thing about him to long for.
Murray was not so much accomplished in comparison as he was just a lot fucking older.
The American Dream is to be pursued on strict terms dictated by a class of people who generally had the luxury of being born into a family that had already achieved the dream. We want everyone to pursue good grades and obedience in school, which culminates in acceptance to an institution of learning where one can find a degree that is often more ceremonial than useful.
