"Memoirs of a Muse"

[fiefoe]

You say muse, I say kept woman with daddy issues. I didn't find Lara Vapnyar's coming-of-age story inspiring, though the ending has a neat twist well-used by nearly all New Yorker short fiction writers that obliquely rewards the reader for sticking with all the squalidness. Maybe if I ever manage to get through Dostoyevsky I'd feel more charitable with the heroine.

• I had to struggle to remember if they had really looked different before I left. I caught myself being disturbed by the fact that death wasn't anything extravagant. She just disappeared.
• the room where the piles of dirty dishes and trash seemed to be the only things left of my grandmother's existence.
• It could very well have been somebody else's body in this whirlpool of big and small pains, mixed with the occasional bubble of pleasure swimming to the surface here and there. .. Feeling the pleasure was confusing, humiliating. It made her an accomplice to the act.
• But at night, when dressed in my yellow pajamas and with my hair braided, and while looking in the wall mirror illuminated by the soft cone of light coming from my desk lamp, I wasn't just pretty, I was fantastically beautiful, charming, magical. If only the boys could see me then!
• "A maddening imprint" of her foot... That expression moved me so much.
• "Better" was too vague, too light, and by definition too elusive. If something were better, another thing could be still better yet, so how could you strive to achieve something that was by definition surpassable? No, I refused to be excited by "better.".. The word "Different" had something magical about it... Different - no matter better or worse - could never be boring. {看吧，no zuo no die 不知国界。}
• They thought of marriage as an achievement.
• At times, I felt what I called "a high burning." The anticipation of happiness throbbed in my temples, tickled the tips of my toes, rolled into a sweet lump in my throat, behaved as something separate and alive inside me... I knew that on the days when I glowed, men were able to grasp it. {Sadly, this is the closest thing to grand passion anywhere in the book.}
• Elegant people roamed the streets with an air of tired sophistication lurking somewhere in the corners of their mouths or the line of a cheekbone.
• There, behind the warm screen of the strangers' bodies, the nervousness of the date left me. I felt wonderfully alone, uninhibited and ready to savor the chaos of fresh recollections.
• I'd never known such intimacy with anyone as I had on the subway with the Mark of my imagination.
• (My relatives) didn't pose any questions to me, treating me with respectful restraint, as if I had become one of the objects in the apartment.