Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.

The Mexicans get the shittiest, most dangerous jobs, and the whites still complain.

“You didn’t hear this from me, okay?” she continued. “The girls, Ann and Natalie, they were biters.”

I swept out the contents of the dollhouse room by room, smashing my little four-poster bed, Amma’s day bed, the lemon yellow love seat. Once I’d flung out my mother’s big brass canopy and destroyed her vanity table, either Amma or I screamed. Maybe both of us did. The floor of my mother’s room. The beautiful ivory tiles. Made of human teeth. Fifty-six tiny teeth, cleaned and bleached and shining from the floor.

Sometimes when you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.

Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she’d shrieked at me. I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.