Youโre like Marilyn Monroe,โ Ken tells me, which I take as a compliment and say a nervous โThank Youโ. Interrupting, he adds, โYouโre all velvet and Velcro. Men want you because youโre sexy and broken and when it gets too rough they can say โHey! This toy is broken!โ and toss you aside without feeling bad.
Emma ForrestIt is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.
Emma ForrestI wish I had been less keen to inject my own opinions, but I was a teenager and your teenage self is generally an idiot compared to the adult you. That's the way it should be. If it's the other way around, you have a problem.
Emma ForrestHe was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.
Emma ForrestThere is that doll dress-up quality of adorable teenage girl writer, and I never felt either as adorable as I was supposed to be, or as dark as the rumors, you know, "She must have slept with the editor," and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm still a virgin." It was very strange.
Emma ForrestThere is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.
Emma Forrest