Eileen

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.

People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.

Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose.

You can see wealth in people no matter what they're wearing. It's in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.

Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth.

A grown woman is like a coyote--she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they'll die of sadness

Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.

The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.

I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around. I really thought I had everybody fooled. And I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics. I liked books about awful things—murder, illness, death.

I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.

I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me—they didn’t—but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s.

It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds—look for the cleanest fingernails.

I'd never learned how to relate to people, much less how to speak up for myself. I preferred to sit and rage quietly.

Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.

Thus, I lived in perpetual fantasy. And like all intelligent young women, I hid my shameful perversions under a facade of prudishness. Of course I did. It's easy to tell the dirtiest minds-look for the cleanest fingernails.

People died all the time. Why couldn't I?

I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.

There is nobody watching you when you’re alone. You decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don’t be a fool.

I didn’t believe in heaven, but I did believe in hell.

That is what I imagined life to be—one long sentence of waiting out the clock.

I've lived with many alcoholic men over the years, and each has taught me that it is useless to worry, fruitless to ask why, suicide to try to help them. They are who they are for better and worse.

There’s nothing I detest more than men with happy childhoods.

It's the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.

All I had to offer were my skills as a doormat, a blank wall, someone desperate enough to do anything—just short of murder, let's say—simply to get someone to like me, let alone love me.

I was nervous. It had been a long time since I’d gone any place I wanted to be.

You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed---either she's an outsider, or she's insane.

I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library—something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.

It also concerned me that my demise would have no great impact, that I could blow my head off and people would say, “That’s all right. Let’s get something to eat.” That