Welcome to Litsy!

"I want to feel anything deeply. // I want to know what I‘m feeling. // Then I want to be coy and not tell people about it. // I want them to ask. I want them to insist."
Mood ?

"When we originally went to the moon, our total focus was going to the moon. We weren‘t thinking about looking back at Earth. But now that we‘ve done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went."

"John bought me this mirror for my birthday. Or John used his parents‘ money to buy me this mirror for my birthday. John used his parents‘ money to buy me a gift card. I used the gift card to buy this mirror for my birthday."
The layers of alienation between them. It chilled me a little.

"To disagree with John would be to renounce what he believes are our beliefs, what I believe he believes are our beliefs. To disagree with him would be to admit that I‘ve lied. He‘ll know I‘m lying."

Holy crap. 😍

Just devoured this in a couple of hours. What a punch to the gut.

I devoured this book. It's unraveling, rolling prose flows like water as Gerard swiftly moves between her characters, internal and external thoughts. The sparseness of her words and the sentence structure, almost like a poem, generate the best and most disturbing insight into eating disorders I have read and for that, I thank her.

Early morning reading (and kitty time) before my busy Saturday gets going. I can only read this book in short chunks. It deals with anorexia and alcoholism and it's pretty intense.

While I enjoyed the style and tone, i was frustrated by the focus on these characters' respective depressions. Their dependencies were isolated, rather than mutual, and the celestial metaphor sufficed with reflecting the stasis of self pity, rather than inspiring the characters (or this reader). Or maybe I wasn't in a mood for a sad book.

Getting down on some surrealism. 20 pages in and I'm loving it.

Audiobook is performed by the author....sometimes this works and sometimes not. I like the audio edition and imagine what it looked like in print due to the speed of which the long lists of ideas the narrator has was read by Gerard.

I didn't think I'd like this (I was seduced by the cover), but it ended up being thought provoking. While I'd definitely be annoyed by or frightened of the characters IRL, they were palatable on the page. This publisher does all kinds of funky things, for those interested.