Horror Stories: A Memoir

Women deserve respect, independence, and equality, period. We’re not carpetbaggers piggybacking on the civilization you created. You made skyscrapers and bridges and rockets? Well, we made you.

I’d draw out the poison of thinking that faults and failures make someone unworthy, and instead I’d reveal how bad decisions

Childhood is a time of curiosity and peril, and nobody comes out of it unscarred.

It's easier to believe in limitations than it is to take responsibility for your fate.

It’s like Camus says in The Plague, that there’s an absurdity to the universe, and you can either do nothing or continue to push to do the best you can. And the best you can do is just do the decent thing. There’s no payoff. The good people of the world are those who, in spite of there being no payoff, do the decent thing anyway. That’s what being human is. That’s the example of a human, being.

I wonder why nobody ever gets into a car crash traveling in the left lane. It still seems incredible to me that all these drivers of average ability pull off semidifficult maneuvers every day and nothing goes wrong. Millions of people manage to successfully navigate to their destinations without dying,

Can you describe someone’s looks without picturing the way they move, the sound of their voice, or their personality?

What exactly are we evaluating when we think about our looks? Is it what’s actually there or how people respond to us that shapes our opinion of ourselves?

You can change your looks easily if you have the right attitude, but bad patterns of behavior are like weeds: Once they take root, they are incredibly hard to eradicate.

That’s the thing they never tell you about looks. They matter; of course they do. But they weigh nothing compared to actions.

My makeup, which was so striking in the photographs, is a frightening mess in natural daylight, caked on and settling into the creases.

Though no one would mistake me for a model, I walk a little taller, with a little more swagger, exhilarated to have a secret occupation that makes me interesting.

That’s the hardest part about being your own product: It’s difficult to know what’s you and what isn’t.

The photographer is sharing her favorite shots of the day with her husband, the two of them huddled together in a touching pose of intimacy.

The show’s over, the illusion undone.

secret chamber that we would later find out had once been used to hide men and women fleeing slavery.

Do my thoughts make any difference? Does prayer make a difference? Can powerful intentions start a separate timeline of events in another dimension of reality? Are we linked now because of our emotional intersection?

There’s something relentless about hindsight. It chips away at the unimportant details, leaving just the guilt, just the unfinished business.

Spread out a towel, lie down, and bleach beneath the not-done, the not-said, the not-redeemed.

I’ve been carrying around for decades the tiny, toxic shards of souls I’ve casually shattered.

We can be monsters, we human beings, in the most offhand and cavalier ways.

Trying to look like I knew what I was doing was my constant priority.

Deep beneath our workaday world, we are all dreaming.

Once your eyes adjust, you’ll see that monsters are only mirrors.

Our flaws and our failures make us relatable, not unlovable.

It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected. We’re afraid we will be defined by our worst decisions instead of our best. Our impulse is always to hide the evidence, blame someone else, put the things we feel guilty about or that were traumatizing behind us and act like everything is fine. But that robs us of the opportunity to really know and care about one another. It closes a door that could lead to someone else’s heart.

How foolish we feel in those rare instances when the fog dissipates, the path is clear, and we see our hapless footprints wandering around all over the place. Those are the resolute moments, the sober morning-after reflections when we plant our feet facing in the direction we wish to go and vow never to deviate from honesty, empathy, and inspiration.

We spend so much time hiding what we’re ashamed of, denying what we’re wounded by, and portraying ourselves as competent, successful individuals that we don’t always realize where and when we’ve gone missing.