Little Words
Hey,
Thanks for stopping by.
Here you'll find my writing and a lot of books and little bites of my life.
Hey,
“What are your affirmations?” Faye said. “What do you tell yourself.”
“I don’t have any.”
“That’s the first step,” she said. “Find what you need to hear.”
So I listened for all of the things I needed to say to myself.
You are pretty. You are smart. You are strong. You are worthy. You are capable of change. You are enough.
And that voice, that voice, was the same voice that said: You are fat. You are ugly. You can’t survive on your own. You are not good enough. You can’t leave. You can’t leave.
“Keep saying them,” Faye said. “Until you believe them.”
"John, please pull over."
We were on our way back to Williamsburg after attending a wedding in D.C. John was tired - he was a groomsman and had been, according to him, subjected to hundreds, no, thousands of photos.
On your first day of college you will think you are lost. Do not panic - you are standing right in front of your dorm without even realizing it. You will never forget what that building looks like again, and, in the future, you will smile when you think back on this memory.
Dear Mom and Dad,
Last night I cried into my pillow like the child I was once to the both of you, but this time it was not over a skinned knee or a cruel classmate or a book.
I cried because sixteen years ago you gave me a gift that I will forever be grateful for.
I’m twenty-three books into 2016.
It's been a while since I have thrown myself into stories this way. The last time I felt the way I feel now about books was when I was fifteen and confident and proud of who I was; reading was the most important thing in my life in that quiet brush of time.
Wrapped in my purple duvet, I finished A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness this week.
It had me captivated from the Author's Note:
I felt-and feel-as if I've been handed a baton, like a particularly fine writer has given me her story and said, "Go. Run with it. Make trouble." So that's what I tried to do. Along the way, I had only a single guideline: to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked. No other criteria could really matter.
If you know me, or you follow my book reviews, then you know I am smitten with Samantha Irby.
I will read anything she writes; I will buy any book she recommends.
Is this healthy? Absolutely not. Let me have this one thing.
It was, of course, the cover that calmly requested my attention.
I don’t think of myself as a pink and gold person - yet, I must be. But I avoided this book. I avoided it for weeks because I did not want to read a contemporary story. I wanted to read about dragons and pirates who could take me to an imaginary world away from this real one.
Rebel of the Sands has been on my TBR list since July 2015, according to my Goodreads account.
I found my copy in the bargain section of Barnes & Noble. Rarely are there young adult books over that way, but the store near my house has a section for these little beauties now. I threw this one in my basket last minute while walking to the register a few weeks ago.
"Send me a list of the books you'd like under the tree," John said right before the holiday last year.
I wasn't sure if he wanted me to send him my "All the Books" Amazon Wishlist, which is somewhere along the lines of 347 items long, so I just sent him the most condensed version I thought he would want to handle.
"Wait. Let me explain...
My whole life I've run into these situations, like that morning with the psychiatrist."
It catches you off guard, Lucia Berlin's writing. When you read lines like the one above, you feel that she's talking right to you from across the porch while her rocking chair creaks.
Each horrific story within Her Body and Other Parties is a brutal representation of the weight and expectations put on women's bodies and what that weight does to one's well being.
Carmen Maria Machado's debut is fantastic; each story in her collection reads like having a splinter yanked from your thumb--a terrifying relief.
I was in Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe a few months ago while in Washington D.C. for a wedding, and I recommend, if you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, you run right into this lovely little store and enjoy all the books that surround you.
Gals, gals, gals (and guys),
I don't even know what to say about this book and these words and this author.
I purchased We Are Never Meeting in Real Life a few months ago and had steadily been making my way through it since August.
"Home schooled and naive, Daisy Wooton is 50% hair and 100% not ready for this mean old world.
Esther de Groot is pale and interesting. Maybe too interesting.
I, Susan Ptolemy, am a human common sense silo. Without me, they’d probably be dead, in jail, or dead and in jail."
I finished Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions while flying to New England a few weeks ago. I wanted to listen to something while traveling that I knew I could finish (the only reading I was able to get done was while I was in the air), so I downloaded this little thing to my phone and quickly fell in love with all of the words.
