by
Sally Rooney
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[...] Ultimately it didn't matter that Nick had taken the first opportunity to leave me as soon as Melissa wanted him again, or that my face and body were so ugly they made him sick, or that he hated having sex with me so much that he had to ask me to stop halfway through. That wasn't what my biographers would care about later. I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.
potential tags: self-loathing, or going off the rails, or jealousy
or something a little more abstract, that's also channeled in kafka/dostoevsky?
[...] He didn't call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on.
Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.
When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.
labour theory of value lol
reminds me of some of the more thoughtful commentaries on the notre dame burning - sure you can rejoice in its burning as a symbol of colonialism, but also, who made the church? the french proletariat. and all are now dead
Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said.
Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on "niceness" as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel "nicer" than Palestine. You know what I'm saying.
I know. I could have told you and I didn't. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.
You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi's rich, Nick's a man, I can't hurt these people. If anything they're out to hurt me and I'm defending myself.
Bobbi and Frances
The restaurants and bars all had miniature Christmas trees and fake sprigs of holly in the windows. A woman went past holding the hand of a tiny blond child who was complaining about the cold.
I waited for you to call me, I said.
Frances, you told me you didn't want to see me any more. I wasn't going to harass you after that.
I stopped randomly outside an off-license, looking at the bottles of Cointreau and Disaronno stacked up in the window like jewels.
love the way she sandwiches the convo in between observations
(ofc, the real revelation here is the miscommunication)
I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.
I didn't think it had to be, I said.
You know, you're saying that, but you obviously weren't happy that I loved someone else. It's okay, it doesn't make a bad person.
But I loved someone else.
Yeah, I know, he said. But you didn't want me to.
I wouldn't have minded, if ...
I tried to think of a way to finish this sentence without saying: if I were different, if I were the person I wanted to be. Instead I just let it fall off into silence. I was so cold.
I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.
[...] Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. [...]
middle of a big paragraph (opening) with lots of action going on (in a dream sequence)
To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you. but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it — Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?
aaaaahhh