Sublime

and wished that being aware of my own ridiculousness could somehow decrease my ridiculousness.

Julia wondered if Rose had sensed that she was about to become a supporting character, instead of the main one, and left to avoid that fate.

that would have constituted sexual harassment in any other workplace except the current White House.

All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.

approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying. Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

O’Connor’s “Good Country People,”

Sylvie kept thinking she would break away, turn a corner, and walk back to Julia. She hadn’t meant to leave with Kent. She’d spoken to him in front of the apartment building, the sun beating down on them. She’d planned to hand over the news like a bowl of bad apples and then back away.

Dischner is the only Paradise City member who naturally looks like a GNR doppelgänger. He’s also the guy who makes the trains run on time; he handles the money, coordinates the schedules, and generally keeps his bandmates from killing each other. All of these guys are friendly, but Dischner is the most relentlessly nice. He’s also mind-blowingly id

But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her.