#zoe heller

[mournfulroses]

Zoë Heller, from "Notes on a Scandal," originally published in June 2003

[aseaofquotes]

Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal

[lillyli-74]

Photography by Margarita Ponomareva

What fantasies we are willing to entertain when we are truly desperate.

~Zoe Heller

[dominik528]

Books I've Read in 2019: Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

[jllongwrites]

By Zoë Heller

“Eventually, Jackson herself came to lament the narrowness of her thematic range: ‘I wrote of neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.’“

“But the last words in her journal, written six months before she died, suggest a woman heroically trying to persuade herself into optimism: ‘I am the captain of my fate. Laughter is possible laughter is possible laughter is possible.’“

I will love Shirley Jackson until the day I die.

Laughter is possible. Laughter is possible. Laughter is possible.

[bennyderler]

[currahee]

Then at last, I did cry. Although, because mourning- even for dumb animals- is never the focused, unadulterated business we pretend it to be, my tears were only partly for Portia. Once the engine of grief was revved up, it began ranging, as grief tends to, about the crowded territory of my other discontents and regrets. I cried from guilt and remorse that I had not been a better, kinder, pet owner (All the times I had rubbed Portia's nose in her own mess when she didn't make it to the litter box). I cried because I had dealt what seemed to me an almost certainly fatal blow to my friendship with Sheba. I cried because I had been desperate enough to consider a liaison with a ludicrous man who collected baseball jackets, and even he rejected me. I cried because I was the sort of woman at whom girls in the hairdresser's giggle. I cried, finally, at the indignity of my crying; the sheer stupidity of being a spinster blubbering in her bedroom on a Saturday night.

Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal

[currahee]

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness- seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realised- how their seeds might have sprouted little green shoots of weirdness, or even, with the right sort of anti-nurture, blossomed into full-blown lunacy.

Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal