More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In every world, she was consumed with the intense contradictions of her heart.
She was inclined to laziness, curiosity, and magical thinking. She was all charm and yet deeply miserable. She was a liar and she hated liars. She loved both truly and wrongheadedly. She appreciated beauty.
I would let a creepy doctor with a secret basement lab shoot a random glowing substance into my ear if I knew it would stop me from feeling the way I do.
Cerulean dress and wide eyes, like a lion. A raging wave of disobedient hair. She contains contradictions.”
To Adelaide, the boy was a promise. He promised her that happiness could still exist, could still be hers.
Or maybe our encounter was in another possible world. That is, in one of the countless other versions of this universe, the worlds running parallel to this one, we are already in love.
As a middle-class white Jewish “faculty brat” with a public school background, Adelaide was conscious of both fitting in and not fitting in.
“Okay, then what we have implied is, It could have rained blobs of peach Jell-O, yeah? And even though there is obviously no way it rains blobs of Jell-O in our world, the fact that we can say it at all implies the existence of parallel universes where it does rain peach Jell-O, other possible worlds,” said Perla. “There’s got to be another possible world for every way that our world might have been but isn’t. That’s what our symposium is on.
She had ruined everything with her unsavory, unwanted sadness, sadness that made her unlovable and burdensome, sadness that was maybe anger in disguise, maybe anger, leaking out of her, because there was nobody to yell at, nobody to vent it on, no way to burn it off. It had to come out.
She had never before thought of her own life with nostalgia as she’d lived it—but that summer it was overwhelming. This will never happen again, she thought. We will never be like this again. Hold on to this feeling. Remember it.
He was a fencer and an optimist. He believed in positive thinking, in psyching himself up for a bout. He was dependable. He had wonderful arm muscles.
But you can be talky and paint your fingernails and still be very sad. In fact, you can be talky and paint your fingernails to protect other people from how sad you are. Adelaide couldn’t find a source of happiness in herself. It just didn’t seem to be there.
Let us run to the lake, where we will strip down and skinny-dip together, washing off the terrible turds of betrayal and unhappiness and never speaking of them again. We will come out clean and lucky and remade. I am so glad you showed me this shit.
“He likes the idea of everything being great more than he likes seeing what’s actually in front of him,”
“People befriend me because they think I’m happy. I’m not even sure why they think I’m happy, but they do. I get distracted, and I laugh, and I turn something on in myself that makes me, maybe, fun to be with. And I’m just— I want you to know up front that I’m false advertising. I don’t mean to be; I just am. I have, like, this huge misery inside me that’s really very, very unattractive, and it has to do with my abruptly broken heart but also with my brother, who is messed up possibly beyond repair.”
I’m not a secretly sad not-all-the-way-lovable person, but am instead the personification of self-actualized awesomeness and will therefore get what I want, given that what I want is Jack?”
Tragedy is attractive.”
“I’m saying all this as an artist and a human being. You hold on to everything very tightly in your body. Did you know that? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it made you ill one day soon.
Adelaide told Stacey S, but she didn’t tell Mikey. She didn’t want to weigh down her first love with her family unhappiness. With Mikey, she wanted to be a shiny, bright girl.
“People who glamorize damaged other people are blech.
Think of your happy memories. Know they are still in you. They are part of you. And maybe even they ARE you.
“That’s how it feels on my end,” Jack cut in. “You don’t know me at all. You just like the idea of me, the way I fit into some fantasy you have of a boyfriend. And it’s mixed with pity and a kind of morbid curiosity about pain and physical difference and curiosity about my mother dying and— Ugh. I hate it.” “That’s called liking a guy when you don’t know him that well,” said Adelaide. “You like the idea of a person, so you want to get to know him. It’s called not being closed off, and going after what you want, and it’s completely awful for you to go telling me there’s something wrong with me
...more
And now I— Well. There has been a lot of DRAMA. Most of it inside my head. And even though the drama is over, it’s still going on in my head, if that makes sense. I can’t let it go or make it stop. So I would like to go numb. All your sober-living numbing ideas much appreciated.
Adelaide wished to love someone and be loved back. And to love someone and know that it was him she loved, not some idea of him. Maybe that was two wishes. Maybe it was only one.
Maybe I even have, like, an addiction to love, or to relationships or something. It’s like being in love makes me feel better, much better, than I do the rest of the time. Except when it makes me miserable. Maybe it’s an endorphin rush? Or a validation?
Romantic obsessional tendency—that is not a good quality in a person.
She almost changed how I feel about the thing that I made, and that just feels wrong, do you know? Shouldn’t I decide how I feel about the thing I made?”
Rebecca paused. “It’s just a jolly whale. I don’t like the smiley-face options. They look weird to me. But I like the animals. I guess the whale is like, Here’s a cute thing to make you smile. That’s all. I’m thinking of you and want to brighten up your day, or whatever. Isn’t that obvious?” “No one uses the whale, Mom. No one knows what you mean when you send it.” “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Rebecca. “It’s still adorable.
And she didn’t want him because he fit an idea in her head that was labeled boyfriend. In many ways, he didn’t fit.
“When you tell me how hard you worked, you miss the point,” said the teacher. “The work you put in is irrelevant. The result is what matters.”
“And this other guy, he makes you happy?” “It’s not his job to make me happy,” she told him.
The process of making would stretch open the universe until it was frighteningly and gloriously wide with possibility.
