The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.

but the work began to move me and any loneliness I felt soon became tempered by a developing interest in creativity.

It was the 1930s, people were a lot more evolved then than they are today.

I love this idea that people 30, 40, 50 years ago were move evolved than they are today.

He’d always been a handsome man, of course, and his good looks had stayed with him into old age, as they so often do with undeserving men.

“Julian was always an impossibility. But Bastiaan was reality. Bastiaan was the love of my life, not Julian. Julian was just an obsession, although I did love him and I still miss him. We had some resolution at the end but not enough.”

Oh, I loved the power I had over him! The power I could sense in myself! You won’t understand this but it’s something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she’s around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it’s even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world. But they don’t. I don’t know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.”

This resonated so deeply with me. The discovery of the power women hold, and at such a young age. I lived it, how many of us have?

Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.