was reading my friend claire carusillo’s the responsible party, which is out tomorrow! it is a madcap epic of shipwrecks and scammers, of jacuzzis and jouissance, of intergenerational trauma and illinois. it is kind of like thomas pynchon’s gilmore girls or if saul bellow knew a lot about skincare and didn't hate women.

the narrator claire says at one point, of her autofictive struggle to relay the story her mother is telling her: “There is so much to wrestle with in each of Kath’s sentences that I am only able to address a fraction at a time, and other times, like now, I can’t touch any of it.” the same is true of the book, which is so wonderfully word-drunk and delighted to dance around the page and is always surprising you with where it goes. here are some passages i highlighted as i read:

“Lilac-tinged sweat seeped from all forty buttonholes down the front of her dress and dripped to the floor from the tip of her beaver’s tail”

"If they sewed Queen Victoria's rubies into the bodices of their nightgowns before escaping the place, they'd suffer a bayonet through the aorta before getting dumped in a mineshaft in Yekaterinburg."

“Sarah relished the attention, but she hid behind a careful, polite persona, lest these Bible women discover she spelled god with a lowercase g in her poetry”

“This style of McDonalds was common throughout my childhood and well into the next century, until a command on high from Hamburger U rebranded every location into the go-go-go all-white-meat-chicken facial recognition software cafes we know today”

"...preeclampsia. I know the term only because the woman whose reality show I watched for a decade before she enmeshed herself so deeply into the milieu of modern American fascism that I couldn't defend her anymore suffered from the same condition."

"She asks me to consider all the unseemly minutes I've spent plucking a melted thong unitard out of my slits and nodes in line for the cash bar at cousins' weddings because I fancy myself too salt-of-the-earth to hand soiled Spanx over to an expert"

"'So your chart says you think you swallowed the flame of a candle? And now you believe that you've burnt your sternum?" Mr. Dan asks. 'I did swallow the flame of a candle,' I say, self-advocating like I read how to do on the internet. "And now my sternum is burnt.' 'Was it a dinner candle?' 'What's a dinner candle?' I ask. A tea light or a taper? Or does he mean a Sterno flame over a chafing dish in a wedding tent? 'You know,' he says. 'One on the dinner table.' 'It was a single wick votive made of regenerative coconut wax.' 'What did it smell like?' Chandra asks? 'Late March,' I say."

"Both salty old dogs were busy when she left, however, so nobody had tipped her off that her esophagus would trampoline to her soft palate and back down to her butthole as the tin-can Clam chucked its strong hips against the breakers"

"I wish Sarah's grief had cut a more dynamic figure, but the saddest expanses of life are the least interesting to relay, clogged with hair in the drain and incomplete paperwork. Sarah soaked in her own sluice with no iPad or palo santo to pacify her, and she was too grievous to masturbate."

"In an age where texting your fake Canadian boyfriend to look busy was not yet a viable option, she busied her thumbs with other projects"

"As she read oregano's ingredient list a second time (INGREDIENTS: OREGANO), hot breath closed its hand around the back of her neck, and she whipped around ready to fight."

"Kath was crying because Marcy was angry with her, and Kath knew crying would make Marcy less mad. But also, crying feels good. I spend my life picking fights and skinning my knees just to have more opportunities to do it."

"They were not yet accomplished enough to be inducted into the pantheon of Illinois folk heroes like Mary Todd, Casimir Pulaski, or the Obama daughter who smokes cigs, but they were relatively young, shared a tube of ipstick and a kohl eye pencil, and brimmed with the potential of local legend status."

"Kath's tongue fished the crumb layer from her molars as her mind returned to the McDonald's parking lot."

"Two cicadas fuck in the air, and when they land on my knee, I am permissive and shield my eyes while they finish."

"I'm angry that the girls from home didn't mention anything to me about Priya, our onetime joint threat, in a group text. But I am not of their world anymore. They are all working mothers of infants and toddlers now, and they have a separate chain where conversation is only suitable for those who have given birth and can thus withstand higher titrations of euphoria and despair than I can. It's okay. I have almost always wanted to be a writer instead of a mother. I've known people who have opened their legs wide to breach the threshold to motherdom and grown defter on the keyboard as a result, but I don't know if I'm built like that. I can only write between the hours of 4 a.m. and 1 p.m., and those seem to be prime child-rearing hours, at least for the first decade. Lately, that schedule is hypothetical. For eight years, I was writing a book with no phones in it about a woman with dwindling prospects who is led to a gold mine in her backyard by a deer she befriends, but every time I've opened the doc recently, my computer crashes and freezes like it's plowed into some big iceberg."

"When an antique glass object sits for decades in an unstable environment like a garage, alkalis leach from the glass in a network of hairline fractures and reemerge on the surface as impossible-to-clean oil droplets. It's called crizzling."

"Entombed in the most unplumbed wedges of the sisters' skulls, these arrhythmic brain cells drove awareness of death to the forefront of their minds."

"The compelling part of these shows is that all the Housewives want the same thing, but they can't buy it, and they can't name it, even though all it is is a little respect."

you can buy the responsible party starting tomorrow! (if these quotes weren't enticing enough, read the first chapter in harper's.)