Suburban Girl Quotes

That girl is a suburban dad's midlife crisis in a high school senior's body

Hey, man, I'm old school. Don't make me bust out the Easy-E and the N.W.A I will got straight up gangsta on your ass. No one is more hardcore than a rich, suburban white girl.

I hate my former self; hate her selfishness and her lack of appreciation for her perfect suburban life. I had everything in the palm of my perfect, lazy hand and didn’t even realize it.

Something snapped," said Madeline. She saw Perry's hand shining back in its graceful, practiced arc. She heard Bonnie's guttural voice. It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child's nanny. And then there was the sort of evil which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts.

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps.

Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?" "Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk." "I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity." "See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head. "You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?" "Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" "Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?" My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. "Why?" "You don't have enough memory." "Oh, come on--" "Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--" "The Big Box." "That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger." The snaking crowd surges forward.

She had yet to learn that playing for a losing girl's basketball team in a quirky suburban town made you a nobody. I had yet to learn that being a nobody is supposed to bother me.

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.

It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child’s nanny. And then there was the sort of evil of which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls being sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts.

I wasn’t interested in becoming a man. I was interested in becoming a more dashing, brilliant, charismatic, mysterious, attractive-to-girls version of what my suburban, television-age upbringing had turned me into—which was basically a collection of appetites.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival.

occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child’s nanny. And then there was the sort of evil of which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls being sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts. “I

Billy knew, as soon as he hung up the phone, a familiar knot in his stomach, that Isabella was the only detective to call for a case like this. As the smartest detective in his Special Victims Unit, Isabella’s edge was her skill in handling women. As a woman herself she had an advantage, but she had taken that edge and honed it by handling the unit’s most sensitive scenarios. That skill would come in handy here—country club set, tony town, mother of two daughters—a lot of women to handle.

Like representative government, soccer has been imported from England and democratized in the United States. It has become the great social and athletic equalizer for suburban America. From kindergarten, girls are placed on equal footing with boys. In the fall, weekend soccer games are a prevalent in suburbia as yard sales. Girls have their own leagues, or they play with boys, and they suffer from no tradition that says that women will grow up professionally to be less successful than men. 'In the United States, not only are girls on equal footing, but the perception now is that American women can be better than American men,' said Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. 'That's a turning point, a huge breakthrough in perception.

When the windows like the jackal’s eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings’ steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers’ corks.

We were working on the idea about dogs’ Internet searches, and first we debated whether the sketch should feature real dogs or Henrietta and Viv in dog costumes (because cast members were always, unfailingly, trying to get more air time, we quickly went with the latter). Then we discussed where it should take place (the computer cluster in a public library, but, even though all this mattered for was the establishing shot, we got stalled on whether that library should be New York’s famous Main Branch building on Fifth Avenue, with the lion statues in front, a generic suburban library in Kansas City, or a generic suburban library in Jacksonville, Florida, which was where Viv was from). Then we really got stalled on the breeds of dogs. Out of loyalty to my stepfather and Sugar, I wanted at least one to be a beagle. Viv said that it would work best if one was really big and one was really little, and Henrietta said she was fine with any big dog except a German Shepherd because she’d been bitten by her neighbor’s German Shepherd in third grade. After forty minutes we’d decided on a St. Bernard and a Chihuahua—I eventually conceded that Chihuahuas were funnier than beagles. We decided to go with the Florida location for the establishing shot because the lions in front of the New York Main Branch could preempt or diminish the appearance of the St. Bernard. Then we’d arrived at the fun part, which was the search terms. With her mouth full of beef kebab, Viv said, “Am I adopted?” With my mouth full of spanakopita, I said, “Am I a good girl?” With her mouth full of falafel, Henrietta said, “Am I five or thirty-five?” “Why is thunder scary?” I said. “Discreet crotch-sniffing techniques,” Henrietta said. “Cheap mani-pedis in my area,” Viv said. “Oh, and cheapest self-driving car.” “Best hamburgers near me,” I said. “What is halitosis,” Henrietta said. “Halitosis what to do,” I said. “Where do humans pee,” Viv said. “Taco Bell Chihuahua male or female,” I said. “Target bull terrier married,” Viv said. “Lassie plastic surgery,” Henrietta said. “Funny cat videos,” I said. “Corgis embarrassing themselves YouTube,” Viv said. “YouTube little dog scares away big dog,” I said. “Doghub two poodles and one corgi,” Henrietta said. “Waxing my tail,” I said. “Is my tail a normal size,” Viv said.

The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles. One

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

She sits with shoulders slumped, staring at the wall, waiting for an answer, waiting to feel some joy. She's holding her breath without knowing it, listening to her body like a pregnant woman, listening, bending down deep into herself. But nothing stirs, everything is silent and empty like a forest when no birds are singing. She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it's like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy? She thinks hard, and two little lines are etched in her bowed forehead. Gradually it comes to her: an image as though from a dim mirror, a thin-legged blond girl, her schoolbag swinging above her short cotton skirt. A dozen other girls are swirling about her: it's a game of rounders in a park in suburban Vienna. A surge of laughter, a bright trill of high spirits following the ball into the air, now she remembers how light, how free that laughter felt, it was never far away, it tickled under her skin, it swirled through her blood; one shake and it would spill out over her lips, it was so free, almost too free: on the school bench you had to hug yourself and bite your lip to keep from laughing at some funny remark or silliness in French class. Any little thing would set off waves of that effervescent girlish laughter. A teacher who stammered, a funny face in the mirror, a cat chasing its tail, a look from an officer on the street, any little thing, any tiny, senseless bit of nonsense, you were so full of laughter that anything could bring it out. It was always there and ready to erupt, that free, tomboyish laughter, and even when she was asleep, its high-spirited arabesque was traced on her young mouth.

Psychopathy means suffering of the mind, as you know, though most psychopaths would argue there is anything remotely wrong with them at all. The DSM lists many antisocial personality disorders and the differences between them can be quite small. Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopath, and psychopath can sometimes seem indistinguishable and be used interchangeably. Diagnosing can feel more like an art than a science. But there are differences, as there are overlaps.

Slightly further afield, you will find Baroque palaces such as Nymphenberg and Schlossheim, with wonderful parks and art galleries. On a slightly darker note, Dachau Concentration Camp is around 10 miles from town. Trains go there from Munich’s main train station every ten minutes and the journey takes less than 15 minutes. Transport in Munich is well organised with a network of trains – S‐Bahn is the suburban rail; U‐Bahn is underground and there are trams and buses. The S‐Bahn connects Munich Airport with the city at frequent intervals depending on the time of day or night. Munich is especially busy during Oktoberfest, a beer festival that began in the 19th century to celebrate a royal wedding, and also in the Christmas market season, which runs from late November to Christmas Eve. Expect wooden toys and ornaments, cakes and Gluwien. The hot mulled wine stands require a deposit for each mug. This means that locals stand chatting at the stalls while drinking. As a result, the solo traveller is never alone. The downside of Munich is that it is a commercial city, one that works hard and sometimes has little patience for tourists. Natives of Munich also have a reputation for being a little snobbish and very brand conscious. To read: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Narrated by death himself, this novel tells of a little girl sent to a foster family in 1939. She reads The Grave Diggers Handbook each evening with her foster father and, as her love of reading grows, she steals a book from a Nazi book burning. From this, her renegade life begins.

As she craned her neck further she finally saw his face. She knew her mouth must have been gaping open like a clown in a ball toss game but she couldn't help it. His face was without a doubt the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It was the kind of face that should have been gracing the pages of magazines, not the sidewalks of suburban Melbourne. The kind of face that made her yearn for her sketchbook and pencil. He couldn't have been more than a year or two older than Sachi was, with dishwater blonde hair cut short and styled meticulously, a pointed jaw and hollow cheeks. His eyes were the colour of storm clouds and framed by lashes any girl would kill for. He was a contradiction of sharp edges and porcelain smooth. He could have been carved out of marble. He couldn't be real.

At first glance, The Town seemed like every other. Its suburban landscape, however, had become infected. Below sharpened blades of green grass that bent under the weight of heavy raindrops, worms wriggled and dug through damp soil, establishing intricate systems of rot; intertwining the roots of tall-standing trees and invading overgrown weeds, harboring all the people’s secrets, filling with blood and pulsating such as the empty womb of a woman overcome by a withering sickness. And unknown to the stranger who slept under a heavy blanket of ash and liquor, but this sickness had also nestled itself —as real and consuming as her organs—within the girl who wandered the streets of the Town. Flickering yellow lights shining through bounds of thick white locks, she could feel it inside her, sliding into her belly, residing alongside the trauma that coated her tongue like honey; sweet as ripe tangerines but bitter against the back of her throat like coffee grounds.

Slater Patalis had been drawn to their suburban home because of Elena. Until that awful, cruel day a lifetime ago, they’d been a family of six. Jeffrey, Marguerite, and their four girls. Mirabelle, with her hot blood and wild affection. Ariel, even tempered and bossy and protective. Elena, who wanted to do everything her older sisters did, and Beth, too young to truly remember now who they’d been together before Slater Patalis walked through the kitchen door.

The Sociopath Next Door.

The four girls crammed around Erika’s small kitchen table wolfing down pizza, munchkins, and chips.

The four girls crammed around Erika’s small kitchen table wolfing down pizza, munchkins, and chips. Bella stood near the counter a safe distance away, cup of coffee in hand, surveying them.

Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopath, and psychopath can sometimes seem indistinguishable and be used interchangeably.

many of the most successful CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs have psychopathic qualities which, ironically, are the very qualities that make them so successful.

How can you tell if a person is narcissistic, unaware, or truly crazy?

lot. Was with him from the beginning. No pre-nup.

studied; but, as far as your

their own heads. “What

chest. The fox had guarded the henhouse,

Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.” For Emmanuel, the snapshots of suburban America presented an impossible dream, a portrait of manicured abundance as distant and as glorious as a preacher’s description of heaven.

the suburban street in front of me. Even though the sky was covered in clouds, it was bright. The smell of the air crept up my nose along with the cold, and it felt like the inside of my nostrils froze. It was beyond crisp, and it almost hurt when I inhaled it. The frigidness bit at me even through my turtleneck sweater, and I found myself wishing for a coat. The wind blew down the road in front of me – rows of ordinary houses, idyllic and snow covered, trees in the front yards, draped in a blanket of winter white. I slipped on the front walk and felt my heart

I wasn’t always a demon. My name is Maggie Frew, and I grew up a simple human girl in suburban Iowa. I don’t carry a pitchfork, or have a forked tail. I’m not a creature from Hell. I’m a political campaign manager. Though, I guess some people might argue those are the same thing.

She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more - that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know. And she was the kind of black girl who'd been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl. And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I'd glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.

I got a few curious glances from some of the girls as I headed over to the DJ booth. As I neared, the DJ looked up with a friendly smile. Dan was a big-boned guy with a crew-cut and he looked like a suburban dad who’d cheer for his kids at their soccer game.

reader, she is also a critically-acclaimed author of non-fiction. THE FORGOTTEN GIRLS is her debut work of fiction.

Mr. White is a biology professor at a posh suburban girl’s school. One day during class he says, “Miss Smith, would you name the organ in the human body which, under the appropriate conditions, expands to six times its normal size? And please define the conditions.” “Mr. White,” the student gasps, “I don’t think that is a proper question to ask me. I assure you that my parents will hear of this.” With that, she sits down red faced. Unperturbed, Mr. White asks Miss Jones the same question. With complete composure she replies, “Why, of course, it is the pupil of the eye, which expands in dim light.” “Correct,” says the teacher. “Now, Miss Smith, I have three things to say to you: one, you have not studied your lessons. Two, you have a dirty mind. And three, you will someday be faced with a dreadful disappointment.

This thing has to be solved yesterday or I am telling you, heads will roll, especially Dennis’s.

gloves all the time. That’s rule four – always fully dressed, always long sleeves and pants, and always have your gloves on. I’ve asked why and Mom has declined to explain, answering with a simple, terse, “Because I said so.” I guess it was in case I ever had to run. My eyes scanned the landscape of the suburban street in front of me.

Weber’s office was located in a banal suburban office complex in

Cecelia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmer blue of their kidney shaped swimming pool, with its powerful underwater light, the perfect symbol of suburban bliss, except for that strange intermit sound like a baby choking that was coming from the pool filter.

Cecilia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmering blue of their kidney-shaped swimming pool with its powerful underwater light: the perfect symbol of suburban bliss. Except for that strange intermittent sound, like a baby choking, that was coming from the pool filter. She could hear it right now. Cecilia had asked John-Paul to look at it weeks before he went to Chicago; he hadn’t got around to it, but he would have been furious if she’d arranged for some repair guy to come and fix it. It would have indicated lack of faith in his abilities. Of course, when he did finally look at it, he wouldn’t be able to fix it and she’d have to get the guy in anyway. It was frustrating. Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.

What if, Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was more than just about housewifely ennui but also about the alienation and unending tedium of all modern work - of a moneymaking need that expands to fill the time available? Why else this constant repetition and reinforcement of a fiction that reality keeps refuting but that fiction keeps reimposing: the fiction of progress, the feeling that we are going somewhere, getting somewhere, that our lives have meaning, that we are not caught in a constant recursion, an infinite loop? Is there progress? What is progress? What if author Ira Levin was not ripping off Betty Friedan but was on her side? What if he was calling back to her, saying, 'I feel you, sister! Fuck the patriarchy!' What if, as Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was an allegory for the lives not just of suburban housewives but of global corporate capitalism? of working ceaselessly with nothing to show for it at the end? What if it represented anxieties about lives of pointless repetition with no progress, no end result, and no possibility of transformation? If it wasn't just the housewives' problem, or a problem caused by housewives who ceased to perform their housewifely duties, but everyone's problem? What if 'the problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot?

By 1971, the average American runaway was a white, middle-class, suburban girl who was barely fifteen.

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The family heard that the meteor shower would be visible from the cornfields of northern Illinois, just twenty minutes away from their sedentary suburban bliss, but Robert had been sleepless for weeks already, images flickering across his dreams—shadows and voices, a burning sensation running all the way to his core. They were mother and father, sister and brother—nothing special, rows of houses the same, but in blue, or yellow, or brick. But for the boy, half of a set of twins, all the magic and wonder rested in his cells—the darkness and vengeance in his sister, Rebecca. So as they snuffed out the lights of the family sedan, hand in hand down a dirt path the boy had mapped out, trust so easy to come by in this family—the girl sparked danger in her squinting eyes, as the boy’s ever widened to the stars, and possibility. Fresh cut grass lingered under buzzing power lines that disappeared as they stretched out to the horizon, a moist smell ripe with cleanliness and godliness—a hint of something sour underneath. The girl grinned as the rest held their noses, so eager she was to embrace death. (How Not to Come Undone)

And she was the kind of black girl who’d been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn’t save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl. And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I’d glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.

From this little hideaway the city felt entirely removed. That was the difference so much money could make. In a suburban rental, hiding out was the same as being forgotten; here, it was a deliberate choice and the rest of the world would just have to wait.

heart-wrenchingly devoid of real friends and real connection,

Psychopaths are not created equal, nor are they all violent. Actually, and disturbingly, many of the most successful CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs have psychopathic qualities which, ironically, are the very qualities that make them so successful.

A total lack of empathy; extraordinary ability to manipulate; an intense drive to get what they want. They have a total lack of guilt, fear, or remorse. They are incredibly charming and use this to control; they read others’ weaknesses and use that as leverage; they flatter and pretend with precision.

A good way to think about it is when you deal with a psychopath you are really interacting with their ‘Mask of Sanity or Normalcy,’ as it has been called. They can keep relationships up for years if the circumstances support it. But most of their relationships sour and fail because people eventually do see through the mask to their real core: which is pure selfishness and, many times, evil.

Women will use whatever weakness in another they can find and twist it for leverage. They will look to socially isolate their prey, speak badly about him or her, lie and twist the truth to their advantage. They seem to crave social elevation

normal, healthy woman won’t lie about what she thinks and feels, won’t pretend she is someone she is not, won’t manipulate situations constantly to ensure she gets what she wants. A psychopathic woman will.

They sound like aliens.” Bella shuddered. “In a way they are,” he answered. “They are in the physical form of a body—many are great looking and well put together—but inside there is nothing but a desire to win. The question is how well the person has learned to hide that truth.

Remember, psychopaths are deliberate: they know exactly what they are doing,” he continued. “They are not psychotic. They don’t hear voices. It is insanity of the most lethal kind because they do not feel remorse when they commit crime, and will do it over and over again. They cannot be cured.

some will deal with their prey outside the confines of violence, but others will feel the need to resort to it. Either way, they will rationalize their actions and excuse themselves from liability one hundred percent of the time. It will always be the fault of their victims. Even when they kill.

She hauled herself out of bed reluctantly and went into the bathroom.

She was sick of all the affect, the self-absorption, the constant preoccupation with themselves and their children. No one she knew had saved the world last time she checked, or found a cure for cancer or worked as a firefighter and saved a life. She was disgusted with it all quite frankly, and with herself, for having become so fully lost in it. Somewhere along the line, her life had morphed into a bubble of money, privilege, status, and inordinate self-obsession. She was suffocating in it; she had to get out. It

And so she signed on, not knowing, surely, what is now quite clear to us: that she was about to create one of the enduring archetypes of the American screen, the noir female. Certainly this creature had her antecedents in the vamps of the silent screen. But they tended to be European in origin, and to hide their schemings under a highly romantic manner. It might also be argued that there were hints of what was to come in figures like Mary Astor's Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (though she, of course, affected a genteel disguise for her true motives). But really the bluntness and hardness of Stanwyck's work was something essentially new, and the alacrity with which it was imitated in film after film of the 40s is one of the interesting, largely unexplored questions of our movie and social history. It surely had something to do with the freedom American women claimed for themselves during the war years, and the nervousness that stirred among males - especially males who were absent at the front and concerned about the fidelity of the girls they left behind. Hard to keep them down on the farm (or behind a suburban picket fence) after they had found work in the rough atmosphere of factories, known the joys of living alone and, for that matter, going to bars alone. Phyllis Dietrichson did none of those things, but she had been a working woman and she was clearly capable of - putting it mildly - a high degree of self-sufficiency.