Alexa

Now I understand that it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

I squat there are think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

My mother told me once that I had a beautiful voice. I was singing along with Olivia Newton-John in the car, and I had been trying to get her to say that. I wasn’t just absentmindedly singing, I’d been going for the compliment. My voice is nothing special, but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you’ve coaxed it out of her,

When I was visiting her a few years ago she hugged me and said, ‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’

And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

She loved a story. She loved a mystery. She could make any little incident intriguing… I wanted her and no one else to tell the story of how she died.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers

My mother had moved back to Phoenix by then, and she paid for my flights to see her twice a year. The rest of the time we talked on the phone, talked for hours sometimes. We’d pee and paint our nails and make food and brush our teeth. I always knew where she was in her little house by the noises in the background, the scrape of a hanger or the

I walk to Salvatore’s Foreign Books on Mount Auburn Street. I worked there six years ago, in 1991. After Paris and before Pennsylvania and Albuquerque and Oregon and Spain and Rhode Island. Before Luke. Before my mother went to Chile with four friends and was the one who didn’t come back.

-Lily King, Writers & Lovers