When We Were Bright and Beautiful

by Jillian Medoff

There’s a fine line, I’ve come to realize, between loving someone and suffocating her.

My point is, you can have everything and still not have enough.

There are two states of male arousal: feral and submissive, each with its own unique tell. Feral men get jacked up in two seconds; they fuck anything in their path. Submissive men are sneakier; they beg for intimacy while pawing their way to climax. On the hunt, both are equally dangerous. Feral guys are fast and ferocious, their aggression is laced with violence; one wrong move and you’re done. Submissive men make no explicit demands, but they lack a core, so you serve as filler. They destroy you from the inside out, inflicting deeper wounds that won’t heal.

Our life is grand and glorious, but also a trap. Money is a noose that yokes children and parents together in ways you can’t anticipate. It binds you for life and then some.

For Eleanor, money isn’t emotional nor is it pleasurable. Money isn’t even interesting. Money just is.

But to me, she’s a tragic figure. Imagine feeling so unfulfilled and so lacking—for love, for attention, we’ll never know—that you pay millions of dollars to carve up your face.

One great lie of modern life is that parenthood is vital and transformative.

The half-life of a daughter’s grief is equal to the length of time she spent with her mother multiplied by the rest of her life.

Which is the funny thing about families, no matter how much cake you have, someone will always feel starved.

If you have no fear, you have nothing to lose; you act recklessly and without restraint.

A girl has more confidence at sixteen than she’ll ever have in her life. She also has more self-loathing. It’s why we’re so moody, why our reactions are outsized. Cyclonic drama is how we achieve balance. The world is chaotic and irrational. At sixteen, we lack a way to control it. So we lean into the chaos. We become the chaos. We express what we feel in real time because we believe, mistakenly, that unburdening ourselves will stop the tumult, or at least help us make sense of it.

For a partnership to endure, he once told me, one person has to be the peacemaker. Someone has to take it on the chin.

Lawrence enrages me, but I miss him. He makes me nuts, but I love him. Opposing ideas can be simultaneously true; one reinforces the other even as they’re both canceled out.

The silence in this house is a beating heart, alive and pulsing with darkness.

This is how you build a girl from the ground up, from the inside out; you give her a voice she can follow and then lead her forward. Wherever you go she is there because she is becoming a woman, she is becoming herself.

“In the legal profession, truth is a malleable commodity. It can be molded, like clay, to mean what you want.”

You can’t sit in a courtroom with a boy, any boy, even your own brother, and not question his innocence. Too many women in the world have come forward. They have too many stories. What shocks me, and keeps shocking me, is that their stories are about men we know—loving men, caring men; men trusted by wives, revered by daughters. Men like Lawrence. Wives like Eleanor. Daughters like me. So, yes, I do have to wonder about Billy because I know, better than most, that anyone is capable of anything. Tap deeply enough, and you’ll find we’re all monsters below the surface.

No one is all good or all bad. You can love your father because he clothed and fed you, but you can hate him because he’s a man and tragically flawed.

Maybe I’m wrong. But I want to believe we are more than the worst things we’ve ever done. If we are, I may have a shot at a real life. Not normal, just real. I also may have a shot at becoming a better person. Not good, just better.