Welcome to Litsy!

A graphic memoir and my #authoramonth selection! #bookspin #doublespin @thearomaofbooks

Loving this! 🍁

“I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are.”

“You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact?”

“I was (and am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year.”

“It was afternoon: that time, around three o‘clock, when a day seems to pause and yawn, before stretching itself and ambling towards teatime.”

“Since then I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there‘s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.”

Have you ever wanted to burst into a round of applause at the end of a book? God, this was so good.

Hilary Mantel‘s memoir isn‘t especially uplifting. Her story is shaped by institutional — specifically, medical — neglect. It makes the pleasure I took from being welcomed inside her brain, where I could luxuriate in the craft of her sentences, feel almost shameful. I‘m choosing to feel wonderstruck (and a bit star-struck), instead.

What a writer!

"Does a story's ending excuse its beginning?"

If it's wrong for a 17 year old girl to sleep with her 47 year old art teacher, does it make it any better that they marry and stay married for decades until he dies??

This memoir was thought-provoking and well done.

Obsessed. The genre bending. The myth. The animals.

“It is time for me to take up skipping…I don‘t want to but I have to try. I‘d rather turn the rope and say the rhyme than skip…

[Hopscotch] is better than skipping, but I find that when I try to stand on one leg, the pressure of my thoughts pushes me over.”

Perhaps this explains why I‘ve never had any luck with sports? 😅