The Big Hurt Quotes

“I thought about my father in 1959, brush-cut and clean-shaven, taking the elevator up to the editorial offices in the CBS building to meet my sad, solitary, lovely young mother. She was tall, she had a nice figure. She had pretty red hair. And she was a real lost soul. It was time for Dick to find a wife. It was time for Jerry to find his next victim. Woody needed a muse. Henry needed to be understood. Spade was on his sacred mission to find the mythical Her. And we, the pretty, bright girls coming up through prep schools and the Ivy League, loaded up with Sylvia Plath and the Romantic poets, were prepped to be the just deserts of genius. We were milk-fed and impressionable. Privileged and heedless. We were disposable and interchangeable. We were only supposed to last for one incandescent moment, like mayflies, then flutter off into oblivion so that the men might be free to work, to publish, and to pursue their next great passion.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“What was a pretty, clever girl anyway? She gets called a “muse,” but she was kindling.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“We do to our children what was done to us.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Seriously, Dad…a peach pit?” “This subject is closed, Erika.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Possibility swelled inside of me like a sponge absorbing the moisture of the moment—the man, the feeling that an epic story had just been hatched. It replaced my own small meandering, domestic tale of disaffection and decay and set me loose on a tide of romance. It was a perfect storm, and Spade was the perfect pirate. Los Angeles, Fall 1988 I met my husband on my first day in Los Angeles.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“I remembered this guy. Spade was the sixty-year-old version of the boys I had found irresistible in high school: brilliant, misunderstood, full of shit, and deeply sexy in a way that only I could appreciate. I felt a low gyration start in my hips that I hadn’t felt in years.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Spade gestured, and his pale wrist caught my eye. His fourth and fifth fingers stood delicately apart from the other three. It was a hand so faultless, so unaware of itself and almost innocent, I felt his mythos transform into pathos. Here was the lost boy himself. I felt my heart squeeze a bit. This is a dangerous dude, I reminded myself.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“What’s your constraint?” I said, using some newly acquired memoir-writer lingo. He ignored the question. “I’m a career yearner. Women rule me. Of course, some of the material was covered in my first memoir, but this book more specifically parses my search for atonement in women.” Everyone in L.A. knew that Spade was a big-league, serial pussy hound. L.A. County was a veritable body dump of his exes. Maggie had bolted out of town not long after last year’s book fest, taking a teaching gig in a faraway state. An editor I knew was still haunted by a brief fling she had had with Spade back in the ’90s. There were literary ladies stretched from Santa Monica to San Francisco whom he had famously romanced, rolled, and rooked over the years. I didn’t know much more about his pursuit of women, other than it had left a high body count.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Sadness was the dowry Jill had brought to her marriage with my father.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Spade loved money in the way only someone who grew up poor could. He understood its feckless ways and spent it joyfully. It was all a big goof to him and the more he spent the harder he had to work, which was how he liked it.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“My life had become so dichotomized and compartmentalized, so off the tracks that I barely understood it myself. I couldn’t tell him that Spade was Jekyll and Hyde, two men trapped inside one six-foot-three roiling meat suit. Nothing about my life was suited for picnic talk.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“I stood with a hot dog in my hand, the sun blazing off my coppery-dyed hair, and I laughed nonchalantly, but it came out as a Phyllis Diller bray that abraded my own ears.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“My father fell hard for Spade. He was impressed by Spade’s fame and enjoyed having someone around who was as encyclopedic about old movies as he was. But their connection was deeper than that. They had both grown up bookish, lonely, only children with family roots buried deep in the Wisconsin permafrost. Both men had caught the big midcentury culture swell and ridden it to respectable fame and reasonable fortune. Both wrote in first draft, both were published by Alfred A. Knopf, both had questionable personal hygiene and an abiding love of processed meats. Both of them loved me devoutly. Whenever I brought them together, I could feel something knit together inside of me.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“My game is the Goodwill and Big Lots!, but the compulsion is the same; I have often used thrift shopping as a distraction from life. I could easily have frittered our family’s fortune away $20 at a time.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Sex with Jonas was okay, but he was unsatisfied. According to him I was supposed to be having orgasms, but I had no idea what that was or how to do it. It didn’t matter to me, I loved fucking and I just wanted to be close to him.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“I almost couldn’t bear how attractive I found Max. He was exactly the kind of boy I liked. I was drawn to teenage Dungeon Masters and conspiracy theorists with keen, encyclopedic intelligences, low GPAs, and deep brown eyes—boys so burdened by their own brilliant complexity that they dedicated their days to killing as many brain cells as possible in a misguided attempt to suffer less. I alone understood their pain and shared their interests. I could meet them on the field of their dreams, and I felt called to enact their fantasies with them.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“It was a perfect storm, and Spade was the perfect pirate.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir

“Everyone in L.A. knew that Spade was a big-league, serial pussy hound. L.A. County was a veritable body dump of his exes.”
― Erika Schickel, The Big Hurt: A Memoir