"I don't let anyone touch me."

“Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breast, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.

Because I could still see a woman in a red bathrobe crawling in the street. A woman on a roof in the wind, mute and strange. Women with pills, with knives, women dying their hair. Women painting doorknobs with poison for love, making dinners too large to eat, firing into a child’s room at close range. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was a three-bullet Russian roulette.”


Say what you will about White Oleander, but it holds so many insights in one bound copy that I don't know how many people have had their world shaken by it. One day I'll go through and create a post full of my favorite quotable excerpts from this book, when I find the time.

So tell me, what do you see when you read this? What picture does it paint, and why, and how? What strings deep in your being does it twang?

I see my home, and how my mother and I sit at the kitchen table, close to the small television in there, so we can watch a movie with the volume low because my father is in the living room sprawled on the couch watching SportsCenter on our big, loud television. I see one of my closest, dearest friends distancing herself from me in high school because I was dating a boy she met once and claimed her stake on. I see Sex and the City and how four women can do nothing but talk about the way men change their lives. I see the desperation of a seventeen year old me because she needs him, she loves him, can't you see, if he'd only come back for longer than a week or so, then he'd love her. I see the way women tailor their lives around the men they love so they can hold on to something solid and safe and strong.

What do you see?