Amazing. I figured this would be a good memoir with unique stories but boy what an understatement. Even though this is written from one person's perspective, I truly felt empathy for each person and I cried for the last 20 pages of the book. I don't know what more to say than, everyone should read this book. I'm so grateful my dear friend Alley shared this with me and encouraged me to read it sooner rather than later.
"Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true." - Dylan Thomas,
"Poem on His Birthday"
Interesting to note that the author capitalizes Dumpster when describing the scene of her mother going through it.
"I'd tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the
person I wanted to be would live."
"What could I do? I'd tried to help them countless times, but Dad would insist they didn't need anything,and Mom would ask for something silly, like a perfume atomizer or a membership in a health club.
They said that they were living the way they wanted to."
Not to imply it isn't dangerous to allow a three year old to cook on a stove, but sometimes it's amazing what people can judge after a moment. My mom always talks about how my brother knew how to cook macaroni and cheese for himself before he was 5 (may not have been 3 but younger than 5) and I never thought that was "wrong" or "inappropriate". My brother never had a major accident, like burning the better part of his body, but things like that happen all the time, so I wonder how wrong it really is to let a child cook at an early age.
"Twenty-three men had already proposed to her, Mom told Dad, and she had turned them all down. 'What makes you think I'd accept your proposal?' she asked.
"'I didn't propose to you,' Dad said. 'I told you I was going to marry you.' Six months later, they got married. I always thought it was the most romantic story I'd ever heard, but Mom didn't like it. She didn't think it was romantic at all."
"Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried."
"What I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes."
"That was the thing to remember about all monsters, Dad said: They love to frighten people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.
"You'd be destroying what makes it special, it's the Joshua Tree's struggle that gives it its beauty."
"What could you expect, from an institution run by celibate men who wore dresses." [in reference to Catholicism]
"Life's a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more."
"Erma can't let go of her misery, it's all she knows."
"Maybe it's because life there was hard and it made people hard."
"Our trips reminded me how easy it was to pick up and move on when the urge struck. Once you'd resolved to go there was nothing to it at all."
"It seemed to make him feel like he was doing what a father should, plucking up his daughter's courage, helping her face the terrors of the unknown."
"I wondered if he was remembering how he, too, had left Welch full of vinegar at age seventeen and just as convinced as I was now that he'd never return. I wondered if he was hoping that his favorite girl would come back, or if he was hoping that, unlike him, she would make it out for good."
"We both stood a better chance if we took on the world together."
"I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want."
"She looked across the table and smiled at me with the smile you give people when you know you have the answers to all their questions."
"They'd stumbled on an entire community of people like themselves, people who lived unruly lives battling authority and who liked it that way. After all those years of roaming, they'd found home."
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