1. （P1）
A woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge.
A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as father.
2. （P1）
I do not know why she didn’t/couldn’t have children. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world - a way of saying that she was here - a Kind of of X Marks the Spot.
3. （P1）
She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unloved life. We do that for our parents - We don’t really have any choice.
4. (P4)
I’m thinking, as her voice goes in and our like the sea, “Why aren’t you proud of me?”
5. (P5)
There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.
5. (P7)
It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself. I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn’t work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving.
6. (P9)
All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer.
7. (P17)
My birth mother, they told me, was a little red thing from out of the Lancashire looms, who at seventeen gave birth to me, east as a cat.
8. (P22)
She once told me that the universe is a cosmic dustbin - and after I had thought about this for a bit, I asked her if the lid was on or off.
“On,” she said. “Nobody escapes.”
9. (P29)
‘She’s a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’
10. (P35)
In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren’t let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.
11. (P38)
I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops.
12. (P40)
I used the money to buy books. I smuggled them inside and hid them under the mattress.
Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that seventy - two per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that soon I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor.
13. (P41)
It is probably why I write as I do - collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin….
14. (P41)
Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.
15. (P42)
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.
16. (P53)
When I went deaf she didn’t take me to the doctor because she knew it was either Jesus stoppering up my ears to the things of the world in an attempt to reform my broken soul, or it was Satan whispering so loud that he had perforated my eardrums.
17. (P69)
Her suffering was her armor. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain.
18. (P84)
We were like refugees in our own life.
19. (P93)
My mother’s eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.
20. (P96)
She thought that happy meant bd/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.
21. (P99)
i looked at her through the window. It had always been through the window - there was a barrier between us, transparent but real - but it says in the Bible, doesn’t it, that we see through a glass darkly?
22. (P100)
Over the gas oven, on a loaf wrapper, it said MAN SHALL NOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE.
23. (P119)
I know now that we heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one - by obsessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
24. (P120)
I was in a night that was lengthening into my life. I walked away and I was trying to walk away from the dark orbit of her depression. I wasn’t really going anywhere. I was going to be away, free, or so it seemed, but you always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place.
25. (P133)
I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule.
26. (P144)
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present.
27. (P150)
The paper chains having from the ceiling began to look like a madman’s manacles.
28. (P153)
Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but time’s domain is the outer world. In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously.
29. (P153)
But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always.
30. (P155)
I was a loner. I was self-invented. I didn’t believe in biology or biography. I believed in myself. Parents? What for? Except to hurt you.
31. (P156)
Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.
32. (P161)
The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea of/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled-up opening a long way back inside e. Inside that walled-up opening, smothered in time like an anchorite, was my mother.
33. (P165)
I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse.
I did not go ti the doctor because I didn’t want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
34. (P165)
I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew the the before-world was gone forever.
35. (P166)
Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture.
36. (P167)
Herman Hesse called suicide a state of mind - and there are a great many people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. They have vacated life.
37. (P186)
We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.
38. (P211)
My own failures of feeling were a consequence of closing down feeling where it had become too painful.
39. (P221)
But he uses the pain of the wound to heal others. The wound becomes its own salve.
40. (P223)
All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognizable by my scar,
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