More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.
“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.
Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather there is none for the many transitions.
I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible.
In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.
Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.
I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.
they made culture happen among themselves—among themselves not because they were exclusionary, but because they were excluded.
The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” meaning that it’s not cunning but obliviousness, willful or otherwise, behind so much brutality.
Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.
kintsugi, which literally means golden repair. It’s a method of mending broken ceramic vessels with a bond made of powdered gold mixed with lacquer. The result turns the breaks into veins and channels of gold, emphasizing rather than hiding that the vessel has been broken and making it precious in another way than it was before. It’s a way to accept that things will never be what they were but that they can become something else with a different kind of beauty and value.
