Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

Frank Curry thinks I’m a soft touch. Might be because I’m a woman. Might be because I’m a soft touch.

Because you and I both know the little Keene girl isn’t just lost.”

My mother and I generally differ on all things concerning my dead sister.

Still no wife.

wondered if the tooth for a tooth part disturbed anyone else.

“No.” His voice trailed off. “I wasn’t.”

The problem started long before that, of course. Problems always start long before you really, really see them.

Instead I drink so I don’t think too much about what I’ve done to my body and so I don’t do any more.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Why would the older (though necessarily less beloved) deliberately harm herself?

It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.

But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing.

What. Isnt she like 6

I’ve always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication—a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.

“I just think some women aren’t made to be mothers. And some women aren’t made to be daughters.”

“I think I finally realized why I don’t love you,”

I didn’t remember doing this. I remembered hearing about Ann doing this.

Uh oh

“And now you come back and all I can think of is ‘Why Marian and not her?’”

Omg

“Someday I’ll carve my name there.”

Wtf

but I was becoming obsessed with the girl.

I’m supposed to be in tenth grade, but Adora thinks I need to be with kids my age.

Same as the other little girl what

Then she spit my teeth into her hands.

Amma and I were sick just like Marian.

My mother killed Marian. My mother killed those little girls.

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom.

I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

Because, Amma suspected, I liked her better.

sharp objects