Thursday

E is still at her office when I arrive, so I use the lockbox to get in and rest for a bit. I only brought one book in my carry-on, Joanna Walsh’s Hotel, knowing that there were just a few pages left and I wanted to read them while in a transient state. The book is tiny, and a bit more forgettable than Break.up, if only because her style (drifting, liminal, almost clinical in its broaching of emotion) is one I already know. But I find the premise, a hotel reviewer contemplating the end of her marriage, compelling. In moments like these, she really nails the female state:

“I want my temperature taken hourly, my pillows smoothed, my corners hospitalized. I want cool water and a straw, I want to be referred for treatment. [...] I want it to be time for something to be done about me; it’s too late for me to do anything for myself. I want to be told to do things, then told to do nothing. [...] I want to be a hopeless case.”

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