Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them.

Outside three girls are leaning up against the building in wool sweaters, faces to the weak November sun. A copy of A Farewell to Arms is facedown on the flagstones beside one of them. Imagine forcing girls to read about the fake and obsequious and self-immolating Catherine Barkley. ‘There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.’ The only Hemingway I’d ever assign is The Sun Also Rises and only really for that passage when he goes into the church and prays for everybody and himself twice and wishes he felt religious and comes out into the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral with his fingers and thumb still damp and he feels them dry in the sun. I love that part so much.