"If so many of us are suffering through these friendship breakups alone, maybe it’s time to start talking about them more openly—to treat them as the significant losses that they are, and to ask for the same level of support we’d expect from our communities around the ending of a romantic relationship."
"I wanted, basically, for someone to show me, in detail, what my life would look like if I had a child, and how I would feel about it. I wanted a crystal ball, and books felt like the closest I was going to get."
"1. Suffer a tremendous loss early in your life. Perhaps the death of a parent at such a young, pivotal age that grief becomes a central part of who you are. Your homeland. Become comfortable in grief, learn its coastlines and caves intimately, so that when someone you love arrives on its shore, stunned and choking, you can greet them and show them around."
"Claiming Plath was a way to elevate our teenage sadness from pedestrian and expected and cliché to literary, tragic, romantic. To tie our early-aughts angst to a dignified and important history."
"Maybe, when I was ready, these books would show me how to pull off the impossible: a murder story that doesn’t further abuse the victim by reducing them to the violence of their death."
"It was easy to believe that the uncorrupted, smoky, jazz-filled utopia of Nin’s Paris was a real place I could travel to if I wanted it badly enough."
"The magic of a braided essay is in the points where one thread drops and another comes in: sometimes these moments of transition are just white space, leaving room for the unsayable."
"The process of rotting in the woods was the last stage of the development of these pieces, like paint drying or glue setting; their destruction was their creation."