Sloane Crosley

A Novel

Cult Classic

Emiley Jones

I suppose death is the ultimate lubricant for truth. [...] I fell for the projection and forgot the person.

May our gaslights illuminate the bridges we burn. 

If I wanted to take the political route, marriage was confinement, a raw deal. People hoped for transformation but too often got lobotomization. Idealization hardened into disappointment. But life is not lived in politics, it's lived in days.

Heartache was something that happened to them, not something they made happen. Feminism failed us on this point. Women are meant to emerge into each chapter as if from cocoons. Divine creatures with a smattering of flaws.

I worried about the betrayal of memory. I worried my former love life was a bomb waiting to go off. Or worse, that it would never go off. That I would wake one day having buried the past so well, I'd find myself unrecognizable.

But their steady sweetness meant they never said anything outside the range of pleasant. Thus impossible as I found them not to like, I found them equally as impossible to love.

It's difficult to comfort oneself by shrinking one's emotions without conceding that one has allowed those emotions to expand, unchecked, in the first place.

Men who told me they were falling for me. It felt so good to say it, they'd figure out if they meant it later.

Romance may be the world's oldest cult. It hooks you when you're vulnerable, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like "baby," brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So you better have a good goddamn reason for saying, "Nah, not enough."

There is a membrane of pride that surrounds the heart, and I found that when that area got damaged, it was hard to figure out what took the hit. Sometimes it was the heart, often it was only the cellophane.

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