Yesteryear

The way some women so willingly compromised every ounce of themselves in the name of building a life for themselves that they didn’t enjoy.

And please give my husband a spine. I’m tired of him needing to borrow mine.

These women wanted—no, they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.

But that’s something I’ve learned in the years since I left the ranch: you cannot change people who refuse to be changed. You can only love them. So here it is, all the love I have to give, pressed into the pages of this book.

All men wanted to become legends. It was so embarrassing.

The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.

A voice in my head, echoing softly: America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman.

Another long drive back home, through the mountains and past the farms and down the long dirt road to the nightmare—I mean dream—of my own making, the world I molded with my own bare hands. Playdough husband, playdough children, playdough life.

Want to blow through five million dollars so quickly it makes your head spin? Buy a fucking farm.

It’s all some vital game, isn’t it? No—more than a game. It’s the long, golden string of insincerity that threads together the entire human race: a shared agreement between women to insist back and forth in endless conversation that this thing we spend our whole lives preparing for—this thing we were born for—is anywhere close to what we thought it would be.

I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise.

Natalie’s like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners. Are you saying my son is a project? I imagined Doug saying. No, I imagined my mother replying. I’m saying he’s the cabinet corner.

How much beauty you've missed. Because it really is beautiful: this future you prayed we would never get the chance to see. I think you'd like it if you gave it a chance. But that's something I've learned in the years since I left the ranch: you cannot change people who refuse to be changed

There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak.

I am starting to think that church might just be another word for people.

America hates women. What a comfort to remember. It is

America didn’t care one iota about morality when it came to politicians. If anything, we expected them to be a little sleazy.

You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!

From here on out, Reena's life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary - smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter. Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for.

The truth is that whoring yourself out can take you pretty far, if you do it with intention. Look at Mary Magdalene. Now there is a woman who understood the assignment.

A lesson it had taken me much longer to learn: sometimes the love of strangers is much more terrifying than the hate.

if you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them.

We should get rolling,” a producer adds. “Or we’re going to lose the light.” I roll my eyes. “I’ve spent far too much of my life chasing the light.

this was the world I was born into: a world where good Christian women moonlighted as crisis managers for their good Christian men.

Everything would have been fine if I’d grown up with a strong father figure in my life, I thought calmly. As soon as I thought this, though, I felt immediately certain that it wasn’t true.

It's easy to go everywhere when you're the one who sets the traps.

the mark of a good career is characterized by one’s ability to attain the rare kind of employment that’s meaningful enough to justify the time you spend away from loved ones.

He could be perfect for politics someday,” Doug said, ignoring his wife entirely. “It’s actually one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink. If you don’t think too hard, you never get rattled.

Like a nun in a porno

I feel like I’m living in the aftermath of a failed punch line.