More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All the books and films and songs that had been written about it were not enough to cover all corners of how great it was; how did anyone see the opportunity in any evening for anything other than having sex or finding someone to have sex with? (This feeling had insidiously evaporated by my nineteenth birthday.)
Hicks was our ringleader—a Suffolk-born wild child with a bleach-blond bob, fierce eyes in a cape of shimmery turquoise shadow, long, coltish teenage legs, and tits I could identify in a lineup, because she had them out so much.
I look over at Farly, who has the family’s black Labrador on its hind legs to make it stand up, its paws in her hands. They too slow dance to the funereal sway of “Auld Lang Syne.”
No matter how terrible life became, no matter how blistering the pain, I was always sure I’d still have room for seconds.
When I got naked with a new partner, I wanted to apologize for what I had to offer and list a series of things I’d change, like a middle-class hostess who says, “Oh, don’t look at the carpet, the carpet’s just dreadful, I promise it’s all going to change,” when she has guests round.
Little did he know that “just hair” was all I thought I was good for. Just hair, just collarbones, just sit-ups. “Just” was all I had expended my energy on for the best part of a year and it’s all I thought I was worth.
When you can’t fall asleep, dream of all the love affairs with olive-skinned, curly haired men that lie ahead of you.
will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.
I would happily take on the administrative weight of responsibility that comes with being an adult in exchange for the knowledge that I always have the freedom to go to the pub on my own and make friends with an old man any day of the week.
(Eventually, Gordon organized for an exterminator to come in. An East End geezer with, ironically, the surname “Mouser.” When he laid down some traps, I asked him if there was a more humane way of dealing with the problem. “No,” he said, his arms folded in dismay. “OK,” I replied. “It’s just that I’m vegetarian.” “Well, you don’t have to eat it,” he replied.)
Cordelia will be confused—they’re apparently too broke to have a string quartet play “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” as she walks down the aisle, but he’s willing to drop £60 on Class A drugs for a room of people he barely knows?
– You don’t like any Welsh people – Recent chlamydia contraction – Your uncle groping you as a teenager – Affair with a married man – You think you can communicate with the dead – You think voting is pointless and boring – Fear of infertility
“Do you want to bake chocolate chip cookies?” Farly said when we got back to our house. “Yeah.” “Great. Make a list of what we need and I’ll go get the ingredients. And why don’t we watch that Joni Mitchell documentary that’s been sitting on the shelf for ages?” “Sure,” I said. It reminded me of the time my mum took me to McDonald’s when I was eight after my goldfish died.
“Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.
This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities goes from this: Family Friends To this: Family Boyfriend Boyfriend’s family Boyfriend’s friends Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends Friends
“We’re not at school anymore. Stuff will happen at different times. You’ll be doing some things ahead of me too.” “Like what? Meth?”
We hadn’t chosen each other. But we were family.
or D) he was writing a book about all the women he’d dated in England and I was up next. I have always thought it was option D and to this day am still waiting to see a book called Green and Pleasant Slags: My Time with English Women on the shelves at Waterstones with an embarrassing paragraph about me in it.)
Forget what I said earlier about using hair-removal cream when you’re dating someone. If you go bald, you’re letting the sisterhood down. We need to actively take a stand against the patriarchal control of female anatomy.
On long, lonely nights when your fears crawl over your brain like cockroaches and you can’t get to sleep, dream of the time you were loved—in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.
– And it’s impossible to put sunscreen on your own back
– Everyone else has one
– Fear of dying alone, the void, etc.
– Not reading as much
“HEY, LADY—GET OUT OF THE FRIKKIN’ WAY!”
It was the soft touch of this man, his generous heart, the tenderness he showed me that was enough to make me open up. So I told him everything; I gave it all away for nothing.
“You have to live. You don’t have a choice. You move forward or you go under.”
I was grateful for the sun on Kew Bridge as I placed each foot in front of the other. I was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out. And I was thankful to know what it was to love the person walking next to me as much as I did. So deeply, so furiously. So impossibly.
I thought I was the most sensiest of selfiest of anyone I knew.
Every room I unlocked, I knew I was getting closer. To a sense of self, a sense of calm. And a sense of home.
He told me that he was a few weeks out of a very long-term relationship. He said it was the right thing—an amicable and mutual separation. He told me that sometimes a breakup can be nothing but a relief for both parties; like an air-conditioning unit has finally been turned off, the low, relentless hum of which you hadn’t realized was there until everything is silent.
Obviously, I would continue to do just about anything if a man I liked told me he thought it was sexy.
Their stories had nothing to do with me anymore, I didn’t need their attention. I felt like I was finally jogging along on my own path, gathering my own pace and momentum.
Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers.
And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough.
