#private rites

[phoenixlegacy]

[emmalovesdilemmas]

Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterwards, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half-asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

[eilooxara]

Reading a Julia Armfield book is like "come closer, come closer, this is literary fiction with beautiful prose about relationships and life and love and grief" but you know it's a horror story because you've learned to read the signs and it turns out how you think it will but you can't take your eyes off it like watching a house slide into a ravine or being dazzled by a cuttlefish's hypnotic patterns and so the horror story can grab you and eat you anyway because knowing it's coming doesn't protect anyone

[lesbianboyfriend]

The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.

Private Rites, Julia Armfield

[valeovalairs]

please i am begging you if you fucking love really good and interesting prose that you just reread over and over again a fascinating manipulation of language and weird stories and water being creepy and something casually horrifying, everyday lives going on as everything crumbles around them, AND queer fiction, please please please reading literally anything by Julia Armfield

[galindatopland]

finished private rites btw

[spikeface]

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

Julia Armfield, Private Rites

[daphneblakess]

books i read in 2026: private rites by julia armfield

to be misunderstood is one thing, but the curious hostility of a sibling's approach lies less in what they miss than in the strange backdated nature of the things they choose to know. a person can be thirty, thirty-five, and yet still largely described by her sisters in terms of things that happened to be true at seventeen.