Smart Girls Like Me

So I just finished reading this book and Diane Vadino manages to annoy me in the same beautiful way my own mind does. The main character pulls apart every situation, noting the intricacies of human behavior and thought. It isn't that the subject matter for the entire book is that great, its the scattered thoughts and moments throughout the book that grab your attention. She explains what you're thinking and feeling in a way you've never managed to realize and highlights some interesting human truths. And the main character's relationship with her best friend captures the type of understated understanding that everyone wishes they had with someone else. Here are some teasers:

"Usually I like calender-appropriate shifts in weather: a cold front on Labor Day, snow on Christmas, lilies of the valley blooming on Easter."

"She is coming apart, the way I was with him, but in a different way. I know this verbal spew, this inability to keep anything to yourself, this innocence of barriers. But as much as she seems to be disintegrating, she also seems to be reassembling herself in an entirely new form. Watching someone change is an unsettling thing, especially when you see them at a distance, a distance that allows for a sweeping vantage: They make you wonder how they did it, who told them it was okay to do so, who you could become if you only had the guts."

"However disorienting it is to fail at something, to do poorly at something, it is equally liberating: For so long I have wanted to succeed at this, but now, it is difficult to muster the energy to guess what it is that someone else wants."

"The person I want belongs to a time and a place that I can no longer access, and that is the person who will keep haunting me, who is a ghost to me. The person standing ten feet away from me is no one I know, no one I love, and no one I want."

"I feel out of season, timeless, rootless, not in a good way, not in the sense that I am immortal, but aimless, like a planet whose sun has dimmed, and the gravitational force that once held me in orbit has abandoned me to drift through space."

"I do not have to stay here. I don't have a boyfriend. I don't have a job. I don't have anything. I can do whatever the fuck I want."


I must complain about the ending though. Because I am doing nothing of 'resume' importance lately and thus doing things like reading many many books, I have discovered that a good ending is hard to come by. I really don't agree with the idea that bad endings make better endings. However realistic, however tragic, I don't care, I want a damn good ending, that is why I am reading; especially because I can't travel. And traveling always works itself out, so a book better too.