My beautiful boy turned 14 in June and I love him so very much. I often wish I had known him from his birth, but I'm still so grateful he came into my life when he was four. He is such a sweet tuxedo cat and my soulmate and he's helped me with certain things in life, like giving up drinking and deciding to live a much healthier lifestyle. 

I've had times where I returned to bad habits before but I think this time I'm sticking to changing, both because of my cat and because you can get away with a lot when it comes to your health at 20, 30, 40, even 50, but once you hit your mid-50s it's not such smooth sailing. I never really rebelled as a child or teen or even as an adult, but my mom's philosophy towards food and other things held on so tightly to me that I wanted to let go in college and then when I moved out on my own. 

But it turns out that sometimes mothers are right about a lot of things...not ALL by any means, but a lot. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in her late 30s and that changed how she saw and treated life. We had always had healthy meals and things like that, but after her diagnosis she locked down completely on the best ways to eat and she became more religious and more serious. 

My parents are super conservative and I'm super liberal and that makes for some really challenging times. But as I have gotten older I realize that even though their views shock me sometimes, their advice and attempts to help me come from a very good place. 

They take walks every day, eat impeccably and live quite austerely. I'm not sure I can go quite that distance, but I do know I don't want to play around with my health anymore. I also want to work on being a better daughter.

 

There are some books you feel like you could have written yourself (under different circumstances and with talent and skill) and Thrall by Rebecca Mahoney is one of them...oh my gosh: it is so good and surprisingly creepy!

My favorite passages so far:

My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world. Of course, every time she said it, “the world” meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was  capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding on to was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again.

I was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of Bubble Wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me—in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus—if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal. 

I tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth.

And this passage too:

Lucy was miles away from anyone who would know this about her, but there was nothing that could stun her into compliance quite like a beautiful*girl wielding a certain, effortless competence. She had, rather famously, fallen for her ex after listening to her order a sandwich.

I'm continuing to thoroughly enjoy this book and the fact that it doesn't romanticize vampirism (though I've never turned away a good vampire-ridden novel if everyone involved is doing so willingly). 

The author is, at least up to where I'm at, addressing the side effects of being bitten as well as the predatory nature of a vampire (or at least, this one) and the results are chilling, both literally and figuratively. 

This in the third dark academia book I've read in a row and it's interesting to see how very different it is from the other two.The isolation the main character in Thrall is experiencing is way too familiar.

(*I would like to add that 'beautiful' is relative and I'm thinking here the word could be used shallowly, but I don't think it is. I have never been overly smitten by someone just because of their looks...once you get to know someone better, their looks change sometimes...a beautiful on the outside person can show they are not so much that way inside and someone who is unconventionally attractive can outshine everyone else in the room. I will say, though, that I can be easily overwhelmed by someone I find attractive and want to bolt out of the room like the character Nate in the first episode of Ted Lasso when he encounters Hannah Waddingham's character).

I can't wait to watch more of Prime's original Ride or Die when I get home tonight. I'm halfway through and adore this show so much, so far. The friendship chemistry is melting my heart and the humor is easing some of my anxiety and the wild parts have sparked my interest. 

I don’t know if I can explain this without sounding odd, but I recently presented a class celebrating Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday and after I finished all the research and after the class was over, even though I think the class went pretty well I just felt so despondent over her life and how she’s misinterpreted by different biographers, depending on who’s writing about her…

 Like Norman Mailer’s work on her is just dreadful…not all male biographers of course but a good amount of them tend to treat her as an object or possession instead of a human being. I called my class Marilyn Monroe at 100: icon, intellectual and influencer, but later I worried that I saw things that aren’t there. 

I believe firmly that she loved to read and was much smarter than she came across and yet some biographies treat her with such a one track mind. 

A couple hours after my class was over I discovered a book that I never saw when I was doing my research. It’s called The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell. I feel like she might be addressing this in her book:

The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

Monroe

Sarah Churchwell

Kindle Highlights 

It is not just the case that biographies of Marilyn Monroe disagree about the answers to charged questions about her life, her character and her experiences. They often do not acknowledge that other versions even exist.

(Location 69)

Marilyn has gone from sex symbol to a symbol of mourning, from a promise of the liberation of sex to a cautionary tale about the dangers of loneliness and spinsterhood.

(Location 90)

Churchwell dedicates a large portion of it to tearing apart biographers like Norman Mailer, arguing that they projected their own fantasies onto her rather than treating her as a thinking human being. She calls out how Mailer, in particular, mythologized her to fit his own narrative of American masculinity and victimhood.

Reading about how she was distorted can feel almost as violating as reading about the distortion itself. It's a heavy read because it forces you to confront just how cruel the industry and the media were to her intelligence. 

She spent her whole life trying to show people that side of her, and she was often laughed at for it. 

I still have more to say...

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of those books I would hug to my heart if I still read print copies, but I feel no less strongly about it just because it's through my Kindle.It's one of those titles that hits hard because even if it doesn't exactly reflect your life experiences it echoes them enough to hurt pretty, pretty hard.

This passage, for instance:

Such generosity, such thoughtfulness. Carolyn was my friend. 

Yet I loved Ginny. 

At the time I was unable to recognize the nature of my feelings. I’d had schoolgirl crushes on other young women, yet I was struck quickly and suddenly with what amounted to true love when it came to Ginny. I loved the sound of her voice, the curve of her mouth, her long monologues at night while she brushed her hair and she told me about a book she’d read or a painting she’d seen. This might be why she has lingered in my thoughts for so long: because she was my first love. It was a one-sided, silent love, and yet it was true. 

This might also be why I sometimes feel I understand Edgar’s grief better than Carolyn ever did. Both of us were left brokenhearted and bereft.

And there is another passage that is so eerily similar it feels like sharing the passage would be almost the same as sharing something way too private about myself or the person it reminds me of so much. I've been experiencing a lot of emotional things this month so this read is packing an extra wallop of feelings and mental time travel.

(later):

Oh my gosh!...I've gotten much further into The Bewitching and I feel strongly that I should list a trigger warning about incest (in a different subplot than the above)...to me this is no longer the beautiful, special book I started out reading. I've got stop getting excited about books until I've actually finished them.

(later later):

I ended up with very mixed feelings about this book, but I still really treasure those earlier passages, mentioned above.