@pg 4 - Girls didn't have underwear so they had to "tense their thigh muscles to hold a rag up..since they had nothing to hold them in place" for thei@pg 4 - Girls didn't have underwear so they had to "tense their thigh muscles to hold a rag up..since they had nothing to hold them in place" for their period. I genuinely checked if this was written by a man when she wrote that. Did they ban vulvas in this universe? Maybe I'm a freak of nature. Also the reason some girls (especially older European women writing books) wanted to get their period was because of the mystique surrounding womanhood.. why would this girl who explicitly doesn't know about that want to have what she just sees as physical pain and imagine the smell... I'm not suspending my disbelief for that. I also like this catty bitch universe where even though they're trapped together there's bare minimum comradery, very French behavior honestly. These ladies would rather sit in naked miserable silence than basically anything else, I guess.
@pg 25 WTF she said they have clothes? Even rudimentary. what's more rudimentary than a strap to hold your pad on or..? Whatever. Whatever. I'm dropping it. It's not important..
@pg 33 Ah. If this is the moral of the book, it's nice but I think I'm past that.
@pg 75 I think I'm too contrarian "We have sandals on." News to me!? "We were sewing earlier but now Greta is reinventing socks." But then the girls are making a hibachi like it's second nature... Weird things to remember and forget.
@pg 107 This part about the grammar is so French.
@pg 171 Honestly, I keep getting distracted like "How does the voice of this book not understand what it's actually like to have nothing. How can you pretend someone wouldn't have imagination or no one would want to make anything or make art. How is the creation of food they showed before and the desperation to create not translate in anyone ever behaving like a human." I'm just going to be disappointed if the moral of this book is as I suspect, which is "Even though I have never known men, it was worth it to know love. Even though I have never known X, it doesn't mean X has no value to me," because I don't like how she went about it.
@pg 193 Sad to report I like the ending less than the fake ending I made up in my head to get mad at....more
I have struggled with this book so far. The narrator is abrasive and unlikeable... or at least an unlikeable retelling of her childhood self. S@pg 229
I have struggled with this book so far. The narrator is abrasive and unlikeable... or at least an unlikeable retelling of her childhood self. Sometimes I don't understand why she wrote a book about weight when she doesn't want to have very meaningful conversations about weight. I can appreciate the thought process of show instead of tell.. It just feels a little shallow sometimes. I was a bit exasperated earlier in the camp experience because it was cutting away every couple of paragraphs of camp life to flashback to family stories it reminded her of. It was very frequent, but we haven't had a flashback in quite a while now. Which I appreciate, but it feels unbalanced. So far, I feel like this book is a good lesson in extending empathy to people who aren't the "perfect victim" on top of how little her being fat seemed to ultimately affect the opportunities she was offered (like relationships, etc.) but it affects almost every aspect of how these opportunities go and how "fat people" are treated trying to live day-to-day. How it did and didn't affect her relationship with other aspects of her life. As far as Steph.. I don't know. She's not trying to be likeable; she's trying to be relatable. I'm not relating, and I'm not liking...
@pg 293 She does some really bad things being a counsellor at camp and owns up to it and becomes almost likeable... Now she just said she likes to be submissive sexually and otherwise, is going to be integral to her adult weight loss journey. Please... I wish it wasn't so..
@ finish I appreciate her candidness. This was all over the place. I don't think I enjoyed it. It's another perspective....more
The Balloon-Hoax: I'm familiar with the meta-story behind this short story. It's not something that really interests me at all for thisRating by Story
The Balloon-Hoax: I'm familiar with the meta-story behind this short story. It's not something that really interests me at all for this day and age. Interesting bit of history-trolling from Poe, though. I've read a fair bit during my wikipedia crawl through The List of Hoaxes. Skimmed and skipped. DNF
I like a lot of memoirs that people say are just a parade of bad things, and I don't mind some soap opera, and I'm really trying to like this. I@pg 50
I like a lot of memoirs that people say are just a parade of bad things, and I don't mind some soap opera, and I'm really trying to like this. I don't like it very much. I know things don't always have to be relatable to enjoy them, but something about how this is written is less like a memoir and more like some random person over-sharing to you, but only parts they think make them have mystique. I also have an aversion to equestrians. These things that happen (all by the age of 14 so far) are often irritating because she shares that they happened but no satisfying motivation or explanation for why she's there in the first place. Something is lost in translation. We go from finding out she vaguely had an older boyfriend, to she liked his best friend, to trouble with the best friend, to the boy dying, to by the way she's 14 don't forget.. in like 3 pages. Why are we running?
@pg 97 To paraphrase: 'I heard the voice of my ex who I am heartbroken by his death in the apartment. I begged him to help me with my current relationship fling.' .............ERIN!
@pg 283 I really wish she would tell me personally less about her frustrating romantic obsessions, but I'm sure it's helping someone else. "I met this guy and I wanted to be in a relationship with him. So I broke up with the other guys I was seeing casually that I haven't mentioned to this point 6 months into liking this guy. Then he didn't want to be with me and I exploded and threatened to kill myself." ...Only so many times I can hear this in one book. The self-awareness about how nightmarish of a personality she has/d is not... helping make it less irritating. She comes off as incredibly ingenuine because she cycles through obsessions with new men every chapter and I can't even keep their names straight. I know this is a part of her issue and why she mentions it, but I hate it...
@pg 285 No shade to her specifically because it happens most memoirs it seems.. just a friendly reminder your memoir does NOT need a chapter dedicated to you getting a passion for writing and deciding to write a memoir....more
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