(no subject)

"It wasn’t that Silas wouldn’t take me in, he would, He’d been doing that since I was eight, but always temporarily. A few weeks, maybe a month or two, that’s how long I’d last before giving in to my father’s pull. And then there was always Jeannie’s push. She’s Silas’s wife and she wants me around about as much as my mother does."

—

Heather Lewis, House Rules

There is something so unbearable about Lewis’s writing.  This paragraph just bowls me down – the fact that there are no adults that Lee can trust, particularly no women, since they are always suspicious of her, as a sexualized child.  And this is only four pages in.

(no subject)

"

The thing is this stuff follows me around and once it starts I can’t move till it’s over. The drinks make it easier, not the other way around, though I’d like it better if you thought I just know how things work and so work them.

I got back to our seats before he did. Our trays had been cleared, the linen was gone. I sat down and poured my drink. Left the tray up. I didn’t need to, though. When he came back, he couldn’t look at me. Had decided his newspaper was what he’d wanted all along. I decided he really had a daughter my age. He was too familiar not to. I sat there and sipped my drink. Enjoyed his discomfort. His loosened collar. That he read the same page until we landed. My drink nursed me until then. And walking off the plane, I could convince myself I had the upper hand, even if it was on his dick. After all, who made who run?

"

—

Heather Lewis, House Rules

I’m thinking of Amma’s line in Sharp Objects, ‘If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.’ which seems like a kind of implausible level of emotional distance for a teenager, even if she is a psychopath, and how Lee is trying to claim that emotional distance, even if she knows it’s a facade.