You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if...
When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for th...
We lose ourselves, she repeated, forming each word with care, but we find our way back. Wasn’t that the story of her life?
This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me, I said, through my tear-clogged throat. I want you to know that. But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, h...
There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling. —GRACE PALEY
The ones who nod in sympathy when their friends talked about street harassment, but whose lived experience involved more shouts of lose some weight than cat calls and leers. The
She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp...
Once, she'd cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. Just be...
On the best days, there’d be a new package of margarine, and Bethie would be allowed to break the capsule of yellow dye and squish it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored.
If you want to hit someone or you want to throw something, I want you to run first. I want you to run until you can hardly lift your legs and your arms. Run until you’re exhausted, and then, if you st...
I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always...
I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way. Hey!
I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren't to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is...
F.E.A.R. Stood for face everything and recover
Evian
But what we're really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need is to just stop thinking...
Bethie and Harold glowed, with success and contentedness, and with, Jo thought, a little meanly, the kind of well-rested good looks you could have only when you were childless.
Admitting you had a problem was the first step - everyone knew that - but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn't fix it
Sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like her skin no longer fit her, and her body was only a collection of flaws to be fixed or at least disguised, an endless source of despair.