Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

I’m a grown man, Nora. I can buy my own Bigfoot erotica, thank you very much.

“Otherwise I remain unimpressed” is what they’ll put on your headstone.

Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world. It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.