She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.

women who had eroticized and sexually defanged every unspeakable shame and violation life had thrown at their womanhood—she

only taste and smell pass directly to the hippocampus, where memory gets stored. Sights, sounds, and touches get converted into thoughts and symbols before they continue on to the memory in the hippocampus. But smell connects directly to memory.”

Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary.

Even the liberal media—The New York Times and The New Yorker and New York magazine—have taken to publishing anti-trans screeds penned by conservatives, the editors disingenuously wringing their hands and pleading “balance” or “wait for the science.”

Jealousy is like a hangover:

only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula

Most of the people she knew with kids didn’t conceive for the kid, they conceived for themselves, to accord with some notion of family, or purpose, or life stages that the child would bring them. Insert whatever worn-down cliché about life not having meaning until one becomes a parent. But whatever, she could get over that. No kid turns out as the

recalcitrant