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I didn’t say no.
I wanted to skip this part, the part where you wondered when the thing you’d come to a boy’s bedroom to do would start happening, when you could stop making small talk that only revealed all the ways this boy, any boy, would never understand you.
more out of curiosity and boredom than desire,
I felt, if it couldn’t be articulated or defended, was invalid. Maybe that’s why I thought I had to listen to Zev, who was clear in his beliefs and never wavered.
“Whoa there, soldier,”
I'm stealing that line
“Could you maybe slow down a little?” Despite all the kissing and touching, I was barely aroused.
Part of me was disappointed he didn’t scream or cry out so I would know if he liked it, if anyone liked it.
“Did you even want to?” Did I? I couldn’t remember.
Journalism is utilitarian, it’s purposeful.
back then, I still believed beauty conferred a kind of moral superiority
alone with my mother, a corkscrew curl brushing her cheek as she cradled her coffee cup in her hands.
“I thought the girl might want them,”
Fuck, I'm already crying
“He said he’s really confused about what happened and just wants to talk. Honestly Isabel, I think he might be obsessed with you.”
They can never comprehend how tbey might have hurt somebody, their brains refuse to let them belive it. Theh just want someone to redeem them and tell them they're a good person whether they are or not.
All men should havs to take a test on consent and be castrated if they don't pass.
“When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
as though he had a say in things, as though the world made sense.
That’s what critique does, shuts us down so only the strong survive. Thins out the competition.”
Did we prefer heroines who suffered?
Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.
Who was there to catch us if not our friends?
The language didn’t soar, but it was real. It was true. That’s the kind of story I want to read, one I can’t stop thinking about, one that crawls inside me. Takes up residence.”
I wondered how Joanna and Tom would even begin to unravel the many threads that bound them.
Everywhere I looked people were talking and talking, working their mouths like cows chewing their cuds, but absolutely no one was listening.
she was beautiful, the way a mountain is beautiful: remote, craggy, forbidding.
I was reminded of the needlepoint designs my mother used to make that looked so perfect from the front, but when you turned them over, you could see every knot and string.
how quickly violence descended upon us.
as small and unimportant as I mostly felt, the egotism of youth hadn’t left me, and I placed myself firmly and squarely at the center of the universe.
I’d replayed the scene in the bedroom so many times, it threatened to crumble in my hands like an old love letter.
We need women. Somewhere along the way the balance shifts and all these boys you pine for now become men who are very afraid of being alone.”
When they talked about favorites, I suspected they were talking about me, but I didn’t care. I’d never been anyone’s favorite.
Did I believe him? We’d just heard Bill Clinton swear he hadn’t had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Did we believe him? We believed what we chose to believe, what was in our best interest. Lies weren’t as bad as we’d been taught when we were children and besides, we weren’t children anymore.
Men are liars. Sometimes with good intentions, but still liars.
I could give him that, I thought, if he wanted it. I could give him everything.
Had any college girl in the history of the world ever been asked what she wanted? I was most certainly the first.
what Zev and I had done seemed consensual while it was happening, not wanted perhaps, but not done against my
He held the key to my undoing, and I let him undo everything.
I laughed too but knew it was the beginning of the end of us. I needed something from him, something I didn’t know how to ask for or explain.
I cried the whole way, everything I’d hated about New York suddenly wrapped in a patina of loveliness:
In the short time we’d known her, Monica had become every girl’s worst nightmare, the equivalent of having your seventh-grade diary read over the school loudspeaker or walking into class with a period stain on your pants. We identified with her, which should have made us kinder but instead made us mean. We felt more comfortable siding with guys like Doug because their side was safer. They would never admit to wanting to fuck Monica even though they would, of course they would, but if they did it would be her fault and not theirs. Her desire made her unseemly.
Why had I believed Connelly when he told me I was special? There was nothing special about me. There never had been.
At twenty-two, I still believed adults did things because they made sense, that they had information I did not have, by virtue of being adults. I was beginning to think this might not always be the case. I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.
I could tell I’d hurt him in some soft, secret place, the same way he had hurt me. But it didn’t give me pleasure. All I felt was sad, as if this was all life was, an endless, interlocking chain of hurting people and being hurt in return.
For him, that night might have been the start of something, while for me it was the absolute and irrevocable end.
women cry when they’re angry, perhaps it was also true that men got angry when they were sad.
this wasn’t what I thought rape looked like,
My belief system was fuzzy, even when it came to my own body.
I didn’t know what to call what he had done to me. I only knew how it had made me feel.
I realized that no matter what he had done to me, I would always be the one unpacking that night, wondering what I might have said or done differently. Even then, I could taste the shame that would follow me for a lifetime. It was gritty, like sand on my tongue. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and thought I might be sick.
I put my arms around her and told her that I forgave her, of course I forgave her. Because even though Debra was impossible and difficult and messy and careless—not to mention certain about things she knew nothing about—she was also my friend and even then I knew she always would be, even when I didn’t like her very much.
We would all leave parts of ourselves behind after we were gone. Nothing we’d done here would be wasted.
how easy it would be to slip into a life he created for me instead of having to make one of my own.
Jason.
There was, I can see now, a kernel of self-preservation at my center, a belief in myself and my future.
