Emily

“Crushed innocence and unannounced misery.” Yet - “life is a luxury” - abjectly saccharine ending?

Paradoxically, the older I am for each reread, the more lecherous HH looms.

Truly the best agony aunt

The cure for any lingering aspirations of motherhood.

“That's the secret, isn't it? They want us to think it's hard, maybe so we'll stop.”

“I confused her absence in conversation with an alienation of affection when it was only a compartmentalization of affection.”

Exploration on the (im)possibility of entirely scrubbing yourself from embryonic desire.

A beautiful, quiet little book.

Positives: 1. True to life depiction of female friendships 2. The relative cinematography (pan in / pan out effect)
Negatives: Couldn't stand a single one of these people, and not in an anti-hero / anti-heroine sense

Singular-voice-driven as opposed to an explicit narrator; which perfectly steers an illustration of volatile and varying intimacies.

Midwestern winters loom large as a background to slippery consciousnesses and even slipperier senses of morality

The weakest of the trilogy, Levy too often loses her already loose thread to insufferability. Yet, her penchant for bread crumbs tightens the narrative just enough.

Self-indulgent, but not entirely to a fault.

A horror novel disguised as literary fiction.

Exposes the Irish grandmother in Doolin telling me “I had the Irish look” for what it was, but beyond that the forced modernity falls a bit flat.

It reads as if Didion wanted to take another stab at A Book of Common Prayer, but forgot that the strength of the first work relied on its absurdism and subtle winks at the reader.

How rude to splay my neuroses across the page like this.

A showcase of stream of consciousness, if only it were a conscious I cared to imbibe.

Mania that worms its way into the crevices of your cerebrum.

I mean, it's Joan Didion.

If I could underline the entirety of this novel, I would.

I wanted to dislike this more than I did.

“I have never wanted to cover the past in dust sheets to preserve it from change.”

The stream of consciousness / lack of quotation marks jive could be a bit much, but by the end I was hesitant to go for a dip in a river any time soon so I suppose it did its job.

An insufferable yet infectious voice.