Finished

Okay I finally finished The Opposite of Fate last night. It wasn't that it wasn't good, but her writing can be too rich, it can give you a tummy ache.

I write because I have been in love with words since I was a child. I hoarded words from the thesaurus and the dictionary as though they were magic stones, toys, treasures. I loved metaphors and used them before I knew what the word meant. I thought of metaphors as secret passageways that took me to hidden rooms in my heart, and my memory as the dreamy part of myself that lived in another world. I played with my memory of both real and imaginary life the way girls play with their Barbies and boys with their penises. I dressed it up, changed it a dozen times, manipulated it, tugged it, wondered if it would enlarge and pulsate until others noticed it too. I thought of it as a weapon, a secret, a sin, an incorrigible vice. The Opposite of Fate: a Book of Musings, Amy Tan

I am in need of lighter, or at least less self-examining books. Coelho and Tan make me talk to myself. Suddenly I am narrating in my head all day and it is ridiculous. I talk to myself in the shower about my mother' mistakes being in my DNA, and I get weird ideas about who in my life is a "messenger". I almost read this book about Joseph Campbell next, I think that would have done me in and I would have quit school again so I could study archetypes in middle America or something.

I am on page 96 of Bookends.