Nine Perfect Strangers

Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships

Men often used that phrase: “drop some weight.” They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to “lose weight,” with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.

remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers, while his hands were on her breasts, as if she’d find this interesting, as if women’s body parts were dishes on a menu

Wasn’t it possible that taking each other for granted was one of the benefits of marriage?

Anyway, I know that Reader, I married him line has become virtually a cliché now, it’s referenced so often: Reader, I divorced him. Reader, I murdered him.

She realized that Joel wouldn’t even notice any difference in her. You never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance-obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off. Even if she’d been a perfectly toned and manicured gym junkie, Joel would still have left her. His “lack of attraction” had nothing to do with her. He hadn’t left her for something better, but for something new.

he saw her mother as just a girl: a girl like her who made mistakes, who screwed things up, who was just making it all up as she went along.

Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head

she swam she gloried in the fact that there was nowhere to be, nothing to do, no-one to worry about.

Oh, reader, of course she married him eventually