two for luck

A commonplace book and occasional photo album by Lisa Reit

[two-for-luck]

Still, every day after school, from the time I was in sixth grade, I was my mother's Scheherazade, saving myself from her reactions had she known how profoundly unhappy I really was, and saving her from having to look her own life in the face. My mother made me a storyteller, and I spent decades of my life unspooling an extremely long autofiction for her, hiding so many parts of myself from view that I could no longer even discern what might be called my "real self."

Gina Frangello, "Ride," from The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause

[two-for-luck]

Because by the time menopause rolls around we better have come to understand we are stardust, we are energy, changeable in form; and also that time is what we make of it, not to mention reality, not to mention love, which is probably all there actually is anyway.

Pam Houston, "The Bunnies, an Owl, and One Coyote That Comes Closer to the House Than All the Others" from The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause

[two-for-luck]

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Henry Oliver, "The epic that forgot to be epic: a literary critic's review of 'The Odyssey'"

[two-for-luck]

When in doubt, don’t argue about the facts. Look for the feelings. Everyone has their own feelings, whether you agree with them or not. When we validate feelings, we create connection that gives us a chance to examine the facts together.

Seth Godin

[two-for-luck]

Like a fool, she believed that her achievements might provide satisfaction commensurate to what it had taken to enact them.

Andrew Martin, Down Time

[two-for-luck]

Whatever I was now: certainly not a model of service to the Lord. No traditional values, or at least none that I wasn't actively working to undermine. I had never worried seriously about hell—actual hell, I mean—outside of looking at Renaissance paintings and marveling at their inventiveness in conjuring demons and punishments. But I had spent most of my life feeling guilty for nothing. Or, rather, guilty for things I'd done, some of which I was objectively correct to feel guilty about, others of which seemed wholly the product of a sin-centered upbringing. I'm not just talking about sex. But another thing about being raised Catholic is that one learns earlier than most that everything is, in fact, about sex.

Andrew Martin, Down Time

[two-for-luck]

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from—toward—; it is the history of every one of us.

Henry David Thoreau, via

[two-for-luck]

Promise me we'll always, always be best amigas! That is, until I realize you were merely the least lame option in a small student body, and I replace you with friends who reflect my actual preferences. XOXOXO —Lisa

Jason Roeder and Mike Sacks, "Realistic High School Yearbook Inscriptions"

[two-for-luck]

I think now the worst affliction / is not to know who you are or have been / I have learned this in part / from writers

Adrienne Rich, "Contradictions: Tracking Poems"

[two-for-luck]

Personally prescient

[two-for-luck]

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

Chinua Achebe

[two-for-luck]

Slept almost 7 hours. Woke. Made a fire. The beach is quiet. All alone. No children, who are all together on a special weekend away with one another. My husband has 2 shows today. No cats. No laundry. Momentarily at 6’s and 7’s. Found my reading material. Like ballast. I’ve heard about these types of days. I suppose I will remain in my nightgown.

Sarah Jessica Parker, "SJP"

[two-for-luck]

Dear Adrienne: / I’m calling you up tonight / as I might call up a friend as I might call up a ghost / to ask what you intend to do / with the rest of your life.

Adrienne Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life

[two-for-luck]

Thus the publication of [May Sarton's] Journal of a Solitude in 1973 may be acknowledged as the watershed in women's autobiography. I call it watershed not because honest autobiographies had not been written before that day but because Sarton deliberately retold the record of her anger. And, above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life.

Carolyn G Heilbrun, Writing A Woman's Life

[two-for-luck]

I really do write for myself, I think, to be able to live. It’s an existential act. It’s been fundamental to who I am and how I am for as long as I can remember. Primarily, I write in a very selfish way for that most essential part of myself.

Jhumpa Lahiri, "Writing Through It"

[two-for-luck]

I think the best endings are really the ones that feel the writer leaves you off at that moment during the party where you’re having a really good time and you’ve eaten and you’ve talked to a lot of people and you’ve admired everything on the walls and whatever, but then they’re saying, “You know what? This isn’t your house. You have to go now.” That’s the kind of feeling I want when I leave a book. “Oh, that was so good, but I know I can’t be inside of this narrative reality for the rest of my life. It’s time to move on.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, "Writing Through It"

[two-for-luck]

There is something knotty here, something puzzling about the human condition in all of this. But maybe it's best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I'm all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I'm weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes To Me