A passage from a book I am reading is haunting me with its undeniable truth:

 "...It’s always seemed to me that she couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

 “Why would you think that?” 

“I believe you always know when someone doesn’t like you, even when they’re trying really hard not to show it."


...Sometimes I think confusion about why someone acts the way he or she does is its own form of heartbreak. If only people knew that outright and honest dislike hurts far less in the end than a forced politeness that comes from not wanting to hurt you :(

I just read this in a book and it rings so very, very true:

"...she couldn’t envisage inspiring such depth of emotion in anyone, and it made her feel cheated."

The character thinking this has never really been in a mutually loving relationship before and so much of what she thinks and feels is often painful and yet refreshing in a genre that can often retread over mundane or silly things and gloss over the nitty gritty of real life.

There are very few books in my reading life that have ever gotten to me like this. The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Diane Wood has made me sick inside to the point that I have thought about not finishing it more than once and yet I keep going back to it because it is one of the best things I have read in ages and lately I just cannot find myself wanting to read that much so if I do read (and really want to read) it almost feels like a miracle.

Only one other book I ever read made me feel this uncomfortable:

A review at the time went:

 “I’ve never seen anyone capture sordid human nature so clearly. I was completely drawn in, totally immersed. I felt ill much of the time.”
– Russell Kirkpatrick

 

The looks on the faces of the people here perfectly capture the childhood of the main character in The Fortune Teller's Daughter, which has a much more benign face to the cover>>>

Though Slights is a horror novel and The Fortune Teller's Daughter is a romance, both feature characters with unspeakably messed up childhoods. The difference is in how one has embraced what happened to her and taken on its sickness and evil and the other has spent her life trying to escape it and be a good person.

In both, there is a sense that loneliness does not truly hurt until you truly understand and know that you are lonely. And one way that can happen, that is so unbearably real and familiar, is 'one day' being okay with being lonely and the 'next day' having met and made friends with someone really, really special and having lost her or knowing you are going to...suddenly, the loneliness you spent so many, many years with and managed okay enough now feels like the worst kind of heartbreak...

good advice...

 

 

so many fears and so little room for them all...

The word  Pnigerophobia can apply to the fear of being smothered, but I cannot find an actual word that applies to the fear of smothering someone else (in this case, I am thinking of friendships and giving people their space) which has been very intense in me lately and not just with one person, but with almost everyone, especially people I really, really care about...

I was still awake in the middle of the night and so I picked up something light to read and was just so dismayed to see this passage in an otherwise very well-written and engaging romance novel:


Lauren's second biography had been of Peter Orlosky, the mega-nerd who had brought down the Microsoft empire with his single, non-proprietary operating system...Not only was he unmarried and childless, but Lauren was pretty damned sure he’d never even had sex. With another human being, that is. But ultimately that tidbit didn’t make it into his biography because she reckoned everyone could figure that out just by looking at or listening to Peter. She certainly didn’t need to tell them.--from the novel Madam President by Blayne Cooper and T. Novan


This kind of mean-spirited writing just floors me and is so out of place with the rest of the novel. The character thinking this is regarded as a well-respected biographer and so that alone is jarring as is that she only singles out this particular person to speculate on in such a manner. But it is her attitude about "nerds" and her assumption that you can tell whether someone is having sex based just by looking at them that is really, really disturbing (not to mention who even really thinks about this when they look at someone and what does it say about that person that she does?)

I know why this strikes such a painful chord within me. I consider myself a nerd and I know that people really do make half-assed assumptions about someone else just by what they see at first glance. Someone who is not physically 'attractive' (boy, do I dislike that word and how quick our society is to label whether someone is or is not) and not good with words (especially verbally and in social situations) is so often dismissed out of hand as not worthy of romance, love and friendship and that breaks my heart so, so much :(

And it just really rubs me the wrong way that virginity, especially in adult men, is seen as something to mock and link with being a nerd and/or a computer 'geek.'