Victoria Helen Stone

"Jane's days at a midlevel Minneapolis insurance company are perfectly ordinary. She blends in well, unremarkably pretty in her floral-print dresses and extra efficient at her low-level job. She's just the kind of woman middle manager Steven Hepsworth likes--meek, insecure, and willing to defer to a man. No one has any idea who Jane really is. Least of all Steven. But plain Jane is hiding something. And Steven's bringing out the worst in her."--

A Novel

Jane Doe

And some days you’re solely running on red wine and pure spite. 

Stephanie 

What keeps me going? I don’t know. Small pleasures, I guess. Coffee. Chocolate. Competition. Silk dresses. A hot bath on a cold day. Winning. The satisfaction of shaping my life into exactly what I want.

Frankly, fictional people appeal far more to me than real people do. In fiction, the choices have to make sense. The timeline proceeds rationally. Emotions are explained to me. Characters feel the way they are supposed to feel in response to the actions of others. Nobody stays in a bad situation because of inertia or low self-esteem. That would make for a truly shitty story. But in real life . . . God, in real life people so rarely behave in ways that improve their circumstances.

“Why do you even want to go out with me? You hardly know me.” 

Not all monsters are terrifying. Some of them are so tedious they’ll just make you wish for death.

Clinging to damaged foundations and wondering why the house is collapsing. 

“Do you really want her to go away forever? It would be walking away from the first eighteen years of your life. We all want a foundation, I think, even if it’s cracked and damaged. We want proof of where we came from even if we’re running away from it.”

The human body is such a strange puzzle of mechanical parts. So delicate and close to giving out at any moment. The tiniest weak link will bring everything tumbling down, yet we all walk around like we’re 

“I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like an insult, but . . . I like whatever is wrong with you, Jane.”

Jane Doe quotes

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