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time flattens us out, time makes us familiar.
I could not then imagine I’d ever have a lover who would not want to see me again. I still can’t.
It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.
You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.
You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.
writing is like drinking water or eating food. Writing sustains me.
From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.
it was the love of an itchy sweater that looks too good on you to throw it away. Every time you slip into that sweater, you know you’re going to get compliments and admiring glances, and every moment you’re alone, you’re going to scratch your flesh raw.
The unapologetically guilty woman sleeps soundly at night.
Who hasn’t lain in bed next to her lover and wished that, coitus concluded, she could turn her head a balletic one-eighty, unhinge her jaw, and snap off the head of the man lying insensate next to her.
Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.
Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women. Unfettered violence, anger unleashed, the will to destroy, the need to undo—these acts run counter to everything we like to think we know about the feminine nature.
Yet women weren’t always the angels in the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent beings playing harps on the tops of trees. We like to forget that men imprisoned women in the house and expected gratitude in return.
One thing I’ve learned since college is that few men will suck your toes. Those who will are men of uncommon bravery, vision, and appetite.
