"After all those trains and all those breakdown lanes"

I just finished Caitlin R Kiernan's book The Drowning Girl. I feel a little bit like I've been punched and a little bit like a weight has lifted off of me.

My Librarything review reads thus:

Words fail me. This book made me cry, made me laugh, made me want to throw up. Everything about this book was made of pure awesome. It's probably the best depiction of crazy that I've ever read. It's claustrophobic and thrilling and haunting and everything good about words.

It's not a nice book. It's a little bit like bleeding, but it is completely and perfectly okay that it is like that because it is so very much itself. The story reminds me a little bit of a cat, in that sort of ineffable but also vividly present way (it would probably be a tortoiseshell). Really good writing sometimes evades words for me, and ends up mixing all my metaphors. The book has already done the work of the story, I can't approach that directly, it's all slantwise and jumbled.

This wasn't the post I intended to write. I intended to write about work, and daffodils, and eagerness, and study dates with my husband, and starting to cook again and the strength of my desire to take swim lessons and inexplicably strong nostalgia-esque longings for things I don't think I ever really had.

"After all those trains and all those breakdown lanes"

I just finished Caitlin R Kiernan's book The Drowning Girl. I feel a little bit like I've been punched and a little bit like a weight has lifted off of me.

My Librarything review reads thus:

Words fail me. This book made me cry, made me laugh, made me want to throw up. Everything about this book was made of pure awesome. It's probably the best depiction of crazy that I've ever read. It's claustrophobic and thrilling and haunting and everything good about words.

It's not a nice book. It's a little bit like bleeding, but it is completely and perfectly okay that it is like that because it is so very much itself. The story reminds me a little bit of a cat, in that sort of ineffable but also vividly present way (it would probably be a tortoiseshell). Really good writing sometimes evades words for me, and ends up mixing all my metaphors. The book has already done the work of the story, I can't approach that directly, it's all slantwise and jumbled.

This wasn't the post I intended to write. I intended to write about work, and daffodils, and eagerness, and study dates with my husband, and starting to cook again and the strength of my desire to take swim lessons and inexplicably strong nostalgia-esque longings for things I don't think I ever really had.