Wilde Lake
All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet
... See moreSarah Perry • Enlightenment
The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a mo
... See moreLauren Groff • Fates and Furies
Who would I be today if I was raised by married parents, if our little family wasn’t weighed down by a secret? I envied Madame Lapierre and her sons, and their clean conscience. And yet, was it terrible to admit that I’d also loved the travails of our life, the inconsistency of Father’s affection, the hardness of Anouk’s hands when they pulled on m
... See moreSanaë Lemoine • The Margot Affair: A Novel
Sylvie leaned against the wall. Because she was clear about what she didn’t want, she was alone. She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming. She was grateful that her father had prepared her for this type of hard, lonely ground. Because of him, Sylvie knew she could exist outside the boundaries of her past and
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