s.penkevich > Books: memoir‎ (29)

‘Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.’

‘There is no need to believe it’s either Everything was Britney’s choice, and therefore she was always a sex-positive feminist or Nothing was Britney’s choice, and the evil adults made all her decisions. Both assertions sound desperate to protect her respectability — another version of her purity, in fact — as a prerequisite for compassion. They remind me of how readily conversations about abuse and assault focus on the moral character of the victim in order to confirm that they have indeed been victimized.’

‘It was always incredible to me that so many people felt so comfortable talking about my body. It had started when I was young. Whether it was strangers in the media or within my own family, people seemed to experience my body as public property: something they could police, control, criticize, or use as a weapon. My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage. And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body.’

‘Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you. I’d been the good girl for years.’

‘I have seen many people quick to become defensive against the suggestion that gendered violence exists in places like the oil sands. They may either work there and are proud of the work they do and the livelihoods they support with it, or they know and love men there, and are insulted by the insinuation of being lumped in with anything to do with something as abhorrent as sexual assault.’

‘I need to tell you this--there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.’

‘I’m the first to think that they’re better than what anyone else does. But then I realize that that has absolutely no relation to what I hope to be able to do, so I conclude that really they’re no good at all.’

‘Someone, somewhere, right now is being impacted by your existence—whether good or bad. That’s what I choose to believe this is all about. Not connection—but how we affect each other. Even at a distance.’

‘Above all I wished to capture the steady flow of unhappiness…The distress I experience on recalling certain images and on hearing certain words is beyond comparison with what I felt at the time: these are merely literary emotions; in other words they generate the act of writing and justify its veracity.’

‘I realize this account may exasperate or repel some readers; it may also be branded as distasteful. I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.’

‘It seemed to me that to put a name to this woman would allow me to construct, out of what is always awakened by a word and its sounds, a personality type: to hold an image of her—even if a completely false one—inside me. To know the name of the other woman was, in my own deficiency of being, to own a little part of her.’

‘I am writing jealousy as I lived it, tracking and accumulating the desires, sensations, and actions that were mine during this period. It’s the only way for me to make something real of my obsession. And I am always afraid to let something essential escape. Writing, that is, as a jealousy of the real.’

‘I became an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I'm aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It's armor. It's easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.’

‘I'm in the ICU with my dying mother, and the thing that I'm sure will get her to wake up, is the fact that in the days since mom has been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia motivation cocktail, and finally I have achieved mom's current goal weight for me: 89 pounds.’