Welcome to Litsy!

Absolutely brilliant, gorgeous prose telling the story of Helen and her relationships with her mother, grandmother, men, and her mental and physical health. This is largely autofiction, and Hobhouse passed away before the editing process was complete, which makes the ending she chose for Helen all the more poignant. Emotional, heartfelt, full of love and melancholy in mostly equal measure, this one just might make my all time best list.

"Perhaps the emptiness of Cape Cod matched my own or perhaps we were like bodies of water finding a common level and I could stop drowning and begin to float."

"The skills were now skills of endurance, our places were set on the board and we were all crawling toward our final position. Things got closer, walls and outcomes."

Continuing my slow read of this extraordinary book.

"Power contained inside a female and used as energy rather than rage was new to me and made my grandmother almost supernatural."

(Daily quote posts from this book are starting to become a bit of a habit. Can you tell I'm loving it? ?)

“From this side, the outside world was closer and the school foreshortened: only the driveway with its triangular hedges and the big moving trees that today filled the air with odors which crashed like snare drums into the smells of Sunday lunch and somehow erotically teased me with their swaying.“

"Photographs are not memories...
For a long time my mother and I lived such a solitary life, city-trapped and economically precarious, so isolated from anything resembling family or stability, so utterly dependent on one another to provide a lovable human universe, that the existence of forebears, documented in hundreds of photographs -- Brown as leaves and dog-eared, but vivid, stylized, ornate, above all theatrical --- seems to me even now...