More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
On either side, my aunt’s house was flanked by mansions, as was the case on almost every street of the town. Poor house, mansion, poor house, mansion, made a chessboard pattern along the street. And the longer I came to live there, the more clearly I understood that the chessboard was not native but invasive, a symptom of massive flux.
“Some things you just have to accept.” I did not know if she meant that my little sister should accept my mother’s craving for love alloyed with violence, or if she meant that I should accept that my sister and I were now on separate trains on diverging tracks, experiencing different childhoods that would lead us to different adulthoods, and were helpless to do anything other than wave through the window as we passed each other.
“What do you like?” I asked, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. That was a character trait of mine, the kind of curiosity that killed so many cats. I was always sniffing rotten food in the refrigerator too.
I imagine him getting redder and redder—he was always angriest when he was ashamed—and blurting out, “This is bullshit, Your Honor, this is fucking bullshit.” He was like an eighteen-year-old who one day woke up in a thirty-five-year-old man’s completely fucked-up life.
“Bunny, nothing is wrong with you. You didn’t do anything wrong.” “Well, obviously I did.” “No,” I said, and I reached out and squeezed her naked calf in my hand. “Do not eat this. Do not take this in as information about yourself. This is not valid data. This does not mean you are bad at sex, or you are gross,
Ann Marie was a special kind of being, small, cute, mean, glossy, what might in more literary terms be called a “nymphet,” but only by a heterosexual male author, for no one who did not want to fuck Ann Marie would be charmed by her. She was extra, ultra, cringe-inducingly saccharine, a creature white-hot with lack of irony. She was not pretty, but somehow she had no inkling of this fact,
“Do you like to be hit?” “No,” Liam had said. “Do you love people who hit you?” “No,” he had said. How old was he? Three? Maybe not even that. “So who is going to love you if you keep on hitting? Who is going to love someone like that?” “No one,” the boy said, tears sliding down his cheeks as he studied the tile floor at his feet. “That’s right,” Ms. Harriet said. “So you’ve got some thinking to do and some decisions to make. You can hit. Not anybody in this world can really and truly stop you if hitting is how you want to be. But if you do, you’re risking all that love that you could have.
...more
I had always had my own erection as a kind of guide, a Virgil, if you will, to lead me through the inferno. And I had been occasionally freaked out by where it led me, but there was no faking it. Women, however, had drunk so very deeply of the cultural Kool-Aid that they couldn’t even figure out if they were cumming. Were they moaning right? Did their tits look good? How were they supposed to let go, get carried away? They were in deepest drag and they didn’t even seem to know it.
“Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,”
“I thought that was the whole point of God. That he could understand everything.” “Some things he chooses not to understand,” she said. “What do you mean?” I thought she was cracked, now truly and finally cracked. “That’s the whole point of hell, isn’t it? A place to put the people God chooses not to understand?”
