("The Animators"), "Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting"

[fiefoe]

I'd thought that I would enjoy this novel by Kayla Rae Whitaker because it's about female friendship and the creative process, but the overcoming childhoold trauma part plus the overcoming major illness part made the book too heavy for my current mood.

• I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else.
• Steady, confident lines, delicate shading. It was work that had a good enough idea of itself to be playful.
• She was naturally, easily good, and when I saw things she had done, I felt a curiously pleasurable pressure at my middle. It was an expansive, generous feeling. Before I saw her, even, I saw what she did.
• “I bet you’re more of a Warner Brothers fan, though.” Mel tilted her beer at me. “I can tell. From your stuff. You do that thing, too, where there’s this, like, acknowledgment that crazy exists. Like it’s out there and pretty close by, actually, but you don’t have to draw it for us. We get the hint.”
• The dust clouds in Mel’s picture. Those were WB takeoff clouds, to be sure. Funny and a little bit eerie at the same time. I knew I’d seen them somewhere before.
• In her other hand, she dangled her bottle with two fingers, like she was used to holding a beer. “Fluted notes of white trashiness. Nuances of crackery, hillbilly goodness.”
• There was no way McIntosh could report the theft, which, we agreed, gave our steal the flavor of deceit.
• I think she called him a ‘punk-ass bitch,’ if memory serves? Charm for miles, lemme tell you.”
• “Right here. See, you’ve already got the beginnings. The sort of hazy quality here, right around his feet. The paws are where they are now, but you’ve made this, like, tension. There’s this potential to move. You were thinking about his next step, even when you were drawing him like he is.
• Being wrapped in that story was the furthest I had ever been away from myself. That something could lift me out of my skin like that was a revelation. When I watched, I was able to discorporate—a word I would learn, and love, later on. I wanted that portal for myself, strange and private and good.
• Had Mel been born sixty years earlier, and a man, she would have been a star: a prewar, chain-smoking, dame-ogling cartoon auteur. Not to say she’s not comfortable in her own skin, but one gets the sense she’s forever strumming on a wire in there, constantly trying to escape from some secret seam.
• Walking into the prison morgue is like entering a school, or a hospital: same industrial-grade lighting, same speckled linoleum, same two-piece office chairs skittering across Berber carpeting. I smell coffee grounds and the spike of bleach cleaner. It is all disquietingly _public.
• The profile’s gaunt, but it is obvious she was once beautiful, that she probably carried that beauty like women who know how pretty they are do—boldly, casually, ungratefully.
• There’s a point, living here, at which you stop being the transplant, the tourist, and become something else. Not a New Yorker. God, no, never that. Just wearily, testily deft at being here. Strangely comforted by darkness and grime.
• I’m developing a talent for getting impressions of Mel’s hangovers via osmosis—variety, intensity, source. It’s like getting something gooey caught in my antennae. This morning, the vibe is hard liquor spiky with something else, something like how I imagine burning batteries must taste. I lean in, smell: low-level rummy with, yes, something sweaty and metallic underneath. I grab her chin, peer into her eyes. Visine’d but too fat around the pupil. Pretty skittery for the here and now.
• Two-time Hollingsworth winner, Vassar grad, confirmed lesbian, smug as the rug’s snuggest bug. “Quiet work that manages to make itself loud,” The New York Times decided.
• I try a fetal position; I paddle my feet. I move everything except my head. It hurts so much I can’t catch a decent breath. The pain is deep, nuanced; it has character, it’s so forceful. Something is wrong. Something is really, really wrong.
• The fruit of the hours Mel spent nerding out over her color key game, a massive shade chart occupying the screen of her desktop Mac, aiming for that grainy, ghostly seventies neon, the look of K-tel record sleeves and ColecoVision graphics.
• There’s something about watching the ball’s arc through the air, feeling its contact with the hand, that does something for thought. Ideas seem to come easier, the underlying wisdom of process and plan appearing in flashes, silver minnow bellies in the waters of distraction.
• The anticipation before a new project. Envisioning it in the confines of your own head, intangible, a whiff of itself, two steps from a daydream.
• I try to zero in on the lines, the sense of flow. The end product is not great, would be discouraging were it not for the clean, sweet feeling of completion.
• She nods. Reaches out and taps my head. “You know,” she says thoughtfully, “when you’re angry, your intonation levels out. Broom-Hilda should totally use this as a therapy tactic.”
• “Florida,” she says thoughtfully. There’s a lull of a few seconds. Talking to Mom feels like jogging with an intentionally slow partner. Every few strides, I have to run in place and wait, or go back for her.
• Just Pete and his skivvies and a baseball bat. And enough chest hair to smother a litter of puppies.”
• “Funny thing,” Mel said. “The prettier the face, the fewer the details. Fewer lines, less sketch time. Not as complex as an old lady. Or a dude. Any dude.”
• We both had the sense that the project was an extension of ourselves. A sense that it would become our shared history for as long as we were immersed in its making—that I would give up my own personhood for a while and double down in Mel’s, for as long as it took to finish.
• You know, the voiceover continues, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there’s the reality that we’re not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint—all the ridges and gathers—on who we are? Do we have a choice?
• There’s a difference between seeing your town on the national news and seeing it on the local. Anyone who grew up with a television containing no flyover states—nothing that represents where and who you are—will know what I mean. You will come to assume that where you are is not part of the greater whole.
• I suspected something out of the ordinary was going on with Teddy. It was in the way he picked through the world, watching everything like it might come down on top of him.
• And I see something I have never seen before in Mel: self-removal. Inside, she has fled. The ability of anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of something violent to grasp the details that remind them of their umiliation—smells, colors, sounds—and blur these details so that they become foreign, someone else’s property. It is a cultivated skill, requiring time, experience, unspeakable mental real estate. It is, for the desperate, the only chance to leave what happened with the part of yourself that is still yours.
• I need to remind her of the world we are both from, where a man will hit a woman in public just as easily as he’ll open the door for her.
• I am the least qualified person to answer this question. How well do I know my own mind, the wormy crannies of my memory? My particular blank space, so white and unknowable that it hurts to look directly into it?
• I pursued my life as if it were the loose end of something I abandoned at birth and, at eighteen, set out to reclaim. I became an artist because I wanted to make a world in which I was not the pursued but the pursuer;
• Did I see any of these people for who they were, when I wanted them? When you need something so huge that you lack a clear objective, you will make do with whatever is there. It’s a story of consumption. Forever a vessel, filled with one man, then another.
• You have an overpowering imagination,” she says. “But it’s a gift you’ve had to pay for. That’s a story that needs to be told. So tell the fucking story, man. Do the footwork. Don’t just fight a fight you know you can win.”

-------------------
Given the title, I should have known this book by Clare Pooley is going to be a purely feel-good story.

• He may even have winked at her—one of those silent moments of communion shared by those attractive and successful commuters who found themselves stranded in a sea of mediocre humanity, like high-performance racing cars in a Costco parking lot.
• He was just the type of arrogant highflier that Sanjay used to see being wheeled into Accident & Emergency with a perforated stress-induced stomach ulcer, or a suspected heart attack brought on by a recreational cocaine habit, yelling I have private medical insurance!
• Everyone stood and started moving toward the doors, propelling him forward, like an unwilling lemming being pushed toward the cliff. He looked back at her in desperation. <> “What do you think of Mrs. Danvers?” he blurted out. She looked totally confused. She wasn’t even reading that book this morning.
• “Because, as a magazine therapist, life experience is crucial. And I have experienced it all. Sexism, ageism, homophobia.” She dropped the words like landmines, which of course they were. If she could acquire a disability, which at her age was a distinct possibility, she’d have practically a full house of potential discrimination cases.
• Her recent exchanges with Piers had served only as salutary reminders that engaging with strangers on the train was not a good idea at all. That’s why there was an unwritten law against it. But she and Sanjay had shared a moment. They were joined together, like it or not, by a brush with death. So, what were the rules now? God, it was difficult being British sometimes.
• “Of course!” she said, before remembering that she’d called him Mr.-Too-Good-to-be-True on account of the way he seemed almost suspiciously nice.
• she said, clutching her hands to her chest and spinning the most vulgar of her rings, the one that had left a dent in his palm, so that the large ruby caught the light, turned it red, and splintered it onto the window next to her, making it look unnervingly like the aftermath of a crime scene.
• You can swap with Sophie and take the toothpaste brief. Hopefully she’ll be less of a . . .” <> Emmie braced herself for the arrival of her least favorite word. “. . . snowflake,” <> finished Joey, as predicted.
• Emmie had chosen this career because she’d thought it would be creative, young, fun, and vibrant. It was all those things, and most of the time she loved it. She just hadn’t expected it to make her feel so grubby.
• She’d become a cause célèbre among the group of older girls who were always railing against everyday sexism and misogyny. They were only trying to be supportive, but didn’t they see that even their well-meaning banner was branding her a slut? Ironic, since she was possibly the only virgin in Year 10, along with Freddie. Anyhow, they didn’t want to be her friends, just her protectors, and their suffocating concern only made her feel weaker and more pathetic. More of a target.
• “You do realize you’ve been talking about me in the past tense, don’t you?” said Iona. “From ‘It Girl’ to ‘Past-It Girl’ in three short decades.”
• I assumed she’d been killed in some tragic but terribly glamorous accident, like Isadora Duncan.” <> Emmie had looked up Isadora Duncan. She was a dancer who’d died at the age of fifty when her headscarf had become tangled in the wheels and axle of the convertible she was riding in, on the French Riviera.
• He’ll also be holding weekly sessions for those of you who think they might be applying to Oxbridge.” The head always said “Oxbridge” as if it were as thrilling as Hogwarts,
• She paused at the door, looked over her shoulder, and said, with a tinkling little laugh, “You know, Daddy always said you were my starter husband.”
• She was slightly concerned that she seemed to spend more time talking to him about herself, instead of him talking to her, which she was pretty sure wasn’t the way therapy sessions were supposed to work, so she’d stuck a sign on the wall reading SHUT UP IONA, which was in her eye line, but hidden from Piers’s view, and vowed to limit her utterances to words like How did that make you feel? and Tell me about your relationship with your mother. <> It hadn’t helped much. She’d never been any good at taking instructions—not even, it appeared, from herself.
• Iona handed him the overly extravagant bunch of white roses that Piers had brought round earlier. Luckily, she’d not had a chance to remove them from their cellophane before David had called. Re-gifting was good for the planet... He was holding a small white card. “My darling Candida,” he read. “Thank you for everything. I love you.” It seemed like she wasn’t the only one who believed in regifting.
• “Is there a doctor in here?” called another teacher, who was holding a tissue up to the girl’s bleeding nose. “Ooh, Sanjay! This is déjà vu all over again!” said Iona. Sanjay sighed, then called out, “I’m a nurse!”