Present a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Whoever puts it in their purse is the woman. Whoever pulls their own copy out of their pocket is Gertrude Stein.
That I find these characters sympathetic, that I wish them whole while assuming they will never be: This is the beauty and frustration MacKenzie has so elegantly combined. It is easy to hate these men, but I have loved them.
When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom sapped from their future. She thought it was allegory until she came face-to-Western-face with a Mojave rattlesnake in the scrub out by the foothills.
You'll really love this book if you have the opinion that reality is weird. And if you think, like me, that the fact that so many people believe that there’s even a steady thing that we could call reality is fucking insane. If that's who you are, this book is definitely for you.
You'll look back and you'll think the scars seem almost invisible, like maybe they'll be gone one day. But then you'll realize you're just looking at the smaller ones, and yes, the bigger one is still right there.
There is pleasure in being seen and there is pleasure in disappearing. Wade in to the swamp, pull out a book, wipe off the slime and sit on the edge to become invisible.
In this experience of oneness . . . Emerson invites comparisons to mystic poets. And like them, Emerson breaks from her singular experience to take on some of life’s biggest questions: What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist?
Remember the little green dolls in Toy Story that live in a vending machine, the claw is their god and they go “The Claw!” and cower away? I imagined the mushrooms in the same way, except their claw is the rain.