Mad Honey

by Jodi Picoult

The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and the mercy of honey, side by side.

“What’s shocking to you isn’t that the justice system is flawed, Olivia. It’s that you were naïve enough to believe all this time that it wasn’t

there’s a particular kind of anti-Semitism that gets leveled at people who “look Jewish,” whatever that means. African Americans with darker skin sometimes are on the receiving end of more bigotry than people whose skin is lighter. Gay men who “act gay” get treated one way, those who pass as straight get treated another.

It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.

there are even some women who have something called androgen insensitivity disorder, which means they have a Y chromosome and never even know it. I don’t think it’s an invisible chromosome, or the inability to get pregnant, or anything else, that makes people so cruel to transgender folks. I think what they hate is difference. What they hate is that the world is complicated in ways they can’t understand.

We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We’re here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

In college zoology classes I learned there are plenty of animal species that change sex. It’s called sequential hermaphroditism. Clown fish are all born male, but the most dominant one becomes a female. Wrasses work in reverse, with a female able to transform her ovaries into testes in about a week’s time. The slipper limpet, when touched by other male limpets, can become female. Male bearded dragons can change sex while still in their eggs, if exposed to warmer temperatures. Spotted hyena females have what look like penises and have to retract them into their bodies for mating. Coral can go from male to female or vice versa. Common reed frogs spontaneously change sex in the wild.

All the times I’ve had to live up to the standards of men—and had to remind myself that those standards are bullshit.

life as a woman isn’t exactly a party. I cannot imagine a man actively choosing to give up that winning ace.

The secret weapon of mad honey, of course, is that you expect it to be sweet, not deadly. You’re deliberately attracted to it. By the time it messes with your head, with your heart, it’s too late.