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Introduction My pen is strong, my voice sincere, Imagination—crystal clear. I write with passion—lucidity, My pen is strong. So mote it be. Through the course of writing as much as I have, I've written about some pretty witchy characters. As my entire brand goes, it takes a witch to write a witch. I've picked up on many practices, my favorite of which: mantras like the above. But that's not all! The joy of the craft is that there are no hard and fast rules. You practice what calls you and you can literally make it up as you go. A lot like writing, huh? ** Important Note : This is not a post to convert. This is not a post to spook. This  is,  however, a post to inform and create some conversation about how the metaphysical can still get real. Let's explore some holistic and alternative self care practices that can help writers with creativity blocks, reduce stress, and reconnect to their writing flow. Manifesting and Affirmation Rituals In witchy terms: Manifesting and affirmation rituals harness the power of intention and energy to attract from the universe what you desire into your life. By focusing on your creative goals through candles, sigils, or spoken affirmations, you’re essentially casting a spell to bring inspiration and productivity your way. Adding science to the mix: Manifesting and affirmations work by using the brain's neuroplasticity. You essentially reprogram your brain to focus on positive outcomes. Repeating affirmations and visualizing success strengthens neural pathways, boosts confidence, motivation, and creative flow. Distilled down, manifesting and affirmations are a way to keep you focused and feeling good about the power you have over your life. But what do you say? Anything that specifically calls to you. Here are some "generic" mindset anchors that are perfectly useful. "I trust my creative instincts.” "My pen is strong and my voice is sincere." " There’s a great story inside that I need to get out, and I know how to do it." "If someone doesn’t like what I write, that is their problem and not mine." "My written word is how others see me, so I will improve how I see myself. " " I am focused, disciplined, and dedicated to my writing goals." " I am committed to improving my craft every day." Tailor these to your specific journey. Do you want to increase your productivity? Do you want to be more creative? Do you want to overcome self-doubt and boost confidence? Ask yourself these questions to see what you need to tell yourself. Write the affirmations down on sticky notes around your workspace or repeat them aloud each morning. Scribble them on your mirrors, your thermos', notebooks, laptop etc etc. You want to see it. You want to repeat it. You want to live it. As for manifesting, write down your specific goals. Like finding a literary agent. Finishing a manuscript. Finishing a   chapter.  Whatever it is, write it down so it's out of your head and into the very real world. Visualize every detail of getting that goal. Where do you want to see yourself with the goal attained? Write that down as well. The visualization helps to reinforce your commitment. This manifesting can help you endure the tough spots. I bought this gorgeous cheese tray with a cloche to cover the cheese. It's meant or entertaining but this witch can get creative. I taped strips of paper with my affirmations inside of this cloche and set the tray on my bedside table. Each morning after rest and each evening before rest, I would lift the cloche and speak the affirmations into it. Silly as it may be, I felt I was building up the good energy I had in myself for a time I needed it. And, when that time came, I opened the cloche and visualized all my good words and energy being released back into me. "Yeah but does it work, Katherine?" you ask. You ever see   Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest?  Jack is seeking help from Tia Dalma in order to protect himself from Davy Jones: Tia Dalma:  Davy Jones cannot make port. Cannot step on land but once every ten years. Land is where you are safe, Jack Sparrow, and so you will carry land with you. Jack Sparrow:  ...Dirt. This is a jar of dirt. Tia Dalma:  Yes. Jack Sparrow:  Is the jar of dirt going to help? Tia Dalma:  If you don't want it, give it back. Jack Sparrow:  No. Tia Dalma:  Then it helps. Find a way to make your own jar of dirt work to protect you from the nasty imposter syndromes, rejections, and overall struggle of being a writer. It works if you work it. Forest Bathing Forest bathing, also known as " shinrin-yoku " in Japan, involves immersing yourself in nature to rejuvenate the senses. Walking in a natural setting, be it a park, forest, or beach, can lower cortisol levels, reduce anxiety, and even improve creativity. Spending time among trees and fresh air,  without digital distractions , can help reset your mind. I suggest getting (safely) lost in a forest that you're generally familiar with. And when I say lost, I mean that you lose the weight of reality and exist in nature. ALWAYS practice proper safety precautions: tell somebody where you'll be, bring water and snacks, wear proper clothing according to the weather, stay on the trail, and use common sense. And then stay lost for a little while. Feel what it's like to be one with the trees. Take in the forest's smells and breathe in the fresh air that the wise creatures offer you. Walk firmly on the ever-changing ground and be intentional with stopping and bathing in the views. Listen to the birds and other critters exist safely under the canopy. Touch the trees and fallen leaves. Feel the flora on the forest floor. Do all of these things, but, above ALL:   take only memories; leave only footprints. Ritual Bath for Releasing Creative Blocks There’s something inherently soothing about slipping into a warm bath after a long day. And what if you could elevate that experience? May I introduce to you the ritual bath—a mindful, intention-setting practice that can help you release creative blocks, alleviate stress, and reconnect with your inner muse. For writers, who often find themselves drained by the mental and emotional effort of their craft, a ritual bath can serve as both a self-care routine and a creative recharge. Sure, you'll get your physical body clean, but the ritual cleans your spiritual body.   It's all about intention.  What do you want to focus on during this ritual? Removing writer's block? Inviting more creative energy? Steeping in a complicated storyline until your plot holes show themselves? Releasing the imposter syndrome holding you back? Inviting the opportunity to get a literary agent? Think about this main intention while cleaning your bathroom. Cleanse the space of any physical grime so it doesn't distract you from cleansing your spiritual grime. Next, pretty up the area around your massive, porcelain cauldron with candles, crystals, flowers, and other items that will bring forth the energy you wish to have around you. And don't forget music! Here are three suggestions of what to include: 1. Unblocking Creativity & Finding Inspiration Purpose:  Clear creative blockages with this bath and spark new ideas to help you tap into a flow of writing inspiration. Affirmation:   “I am a vessel for endless inspiration. Ideas flow to me effortlessly and freely.” Candles: Use yellow or orange candles for creativity and mental clarity. Consider scented options like citrus or bergamot to uplift your mood. Crystals: Place an amethyst (for creativity), moonstone (for strengthening self worth), and smoky quartz (for keeping you present and enhancing ability to work through internal conflicts) around the tub. And, since salt is a crystal, we can't forget epsom salts/ magnesium sulfate. Add at least a cup into the bathwater  to cleanse the negativity away and reap the relaxing benefits of magnesium. Oils: Add a few drops of rosemary (for mental focus), peppermint (for mental clarity), or sweet orange (for uplifting energy) to your bathwater. Flowers/ Herbs: Boil a soup pot with rosemary and lemons. Once thoroughly steeped, strain out plant material and then pour this tea into the bath for an excellent base. Music: Play soft instrumental tracks like lo-fi beats or ambient soundscapes that encourage deep thinking without distraction. An ambient track that I consistently recommend wasn't originally an ambient track. U Smile by Justin Bieber--stay with me--slowed down to 800% is a creation I can only summarize as   ethereal . Half an hour long. Sounds like celestial waves. Ethereal. 2. Releasing Self-Doubt & Embracing Confidence Purpose : You can letting go of self-doubt and boost your confidence with this one. It's perfect for those struggling with imposter syndrome or writer's block. Affirmation : “I release all self-doubt. I trust in my abilities and embrace my unique creative voice.” Candles: Use gold or white candles to symbolize self-empowerment and clarity. Opt for scented candles like ylang-ylang or frankincense for grounding. Crystals: Place hematite (for grounding and energy circulation), carnelian (for confidence and motivation), and rose quartz (for self-love) near the bath. Flowers: Only one thing beats the beauty of a rose--a bouquet of roses. Treat yourself to beauty as you help yourself become more beautiful too. Fun fact according to   Witchipedia : " The Latin term  Sub rosa , or "beneath the rose" references secrecy. A rose hung from a ceiling indicates that anything that takes place beneath it should be held in the utmost confidence." So go ahead and hang a rose above the bath. Tell the rose and bathwater your secrets or deepest thoughts. Release these doubts and concerns from your body and let the water take them away. After the bath, place the bouquet of roses someplace you'll pass by often. Stop and smell them and be reminded of your intent to release doubt and be more confident. Essential Oils: Get the grounding sorts of scents like ylang-ylang, bergamot, or frankincense to help solidify your energy and build inner strength. Herbs: A lovely cup of chamomile tea (hot or iced and sweetened with honey!) sipped while in the bath is a lovely way to release feelings of pain. It also aids the throat chakra so you can speak you mind better! Music: Tune your brain into empowering frequencies! Your body will resonate with the right energies. I'm a huge fan of Solfeggio Frequencies. They are a set of specific sound frequencies believed to have healing and positive effects on the mind and body. Rooted in ancient music traditions, particularly Gregorian chants, these frequencies are thought to align with natural patterns in the universe, promoting physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being This is my favorite video , but please look for a video that resonates the most with you. Here's a guide to lead you to what frequency you may need:  guide . 3. Deep Relaxation & Stress Relief Purpose : This bath is for relaxation down to your bones. You're tired, you're stressed, you need a minute. Take it! Affirmation : “I release all stress and tension. I am at peace, and my mind is clear and ready for creative inspiration.” Candles: Use blue or purple candles to promote calm and tranquility. Choose scented options like chamomile, sweet pea, or lavender for relaxation. Crystals: Surround the bath with moonstone (for emotional balance), rose quartz (for self love and moving forward from struggle), and amethyst (for deep relaxation and is repellant for low-vibration energies). Yes, more salt for the bath, too. Regular degular epsom salts are just fine, though consider some pink Himalayan salts with lavender flower buds and essential oil for an added punch. Flowers: A bundle of fresh or dried lavender set in a vase by the bath will fragrance the air. If peonies are in season, consider floating some flower heads and meditate on how they flow with the bath water. So too do you flow with the windings of the world. Oils: Consider adding lavender, neroli, or sage oils into the bath. They nix anxiety and help you reach new levels of zen. Herbs: Just like you would boil a big pot of bath tea for my first suggestion, toss in sage leaves and bring it to a boil. Steep, strain, and add to the tub for another excellent base. Music: Lo-Fi is high key the way to go with stress relief. When I'm trying to relax and not focus on anything, my body does this great thing where it doesn't relax. Lo-Fi music is calming, but gives your brain something to focus on without taking too much attention away from your bath ritual. Here are some of my favorite lo-fi sounds: Lo-fi for Ghosts (Only) 3 That 2 A.M. Fresh Air Chillhop Essentials 🍁 Fall 2020 Endless Sunday 😌 (Not technically lo-fi but it's low key) Meditation - Monoman Some are more chill. Some are more upbeat. Regardless, your bones will feel like jelly after this ritual. Once you’ve finished your ritual bath, don’t let that energy go to waste! Grab a notebook or open a blank document and start writing. Even if it’s just a stream of consciousness, let whatever thoughts, ideas, or images that came up during your bath flow onto the page. You might find that this relaxed state of mind helps you approach your writing with fresh perspectives and new inspiration. Also consider journaling about your experience. What came up for you during the ritual? Did you feel any shifts in your mindset? Reflecting on these experiences can help solidify the intention you set and keep the creative energy flowing long after the bath is over. Reiki or Energy Healing Another mindful practice from Japan: Reiki, a form of energy healing. Being a writer comes with pressure, deadlines, and emotional highs and lows, which can lead to burnout and self-doubt. Reiki promotes the balance of the body’s energy. This helps reduce anxiety and foster a calm, clear mind. By releasing emotional blockages, writers can overcome mental stagnation or creative blocks. Reiki can also enhance focus and clarity, making it easier to stay present and organized, whether drafting new material or revising an existing project. Beyond creativity, Reiki can support emotional healing, helping writers process difficult emotions or past traumas that might interfere with their work. It promotes self-empowerment and confidence, countering the self-doubt many writers face. By aligning energy and reinforcing positive beliefs, Reiki can help writers regain trust in their abilities, allowing them to push past obstacles with renewed confidence. Through self-reiki practices, working with a practitioner, or using reiki-infused objects, this holistic practice supports writers in maintaining mental and emotional balance, fostering a creative and productive writing flow. If a professional session isn’t feasible, I've enjoyed online guided sessions and (tried) self-Reiki by placing my hands on various energy centers (chakras) to clear mental and creative blockages. ASMR Reiki For Creative Blocks (Plucking, Hand Movements, Flashlight etc)  by Silver Hare ( Tyler Guillory) Divine Care Online 's video by the Late Shri. Sandip Jain My Spiritual Butterfly ( Gwen Allison) 's video Self-Reiki Guided Session for You  by Mainstream Reiki ( Andrea Kennedy) ASMR Role Play Reiki Healing & Hands Movements  by Dmitri at MassageASMR And there are so so SO many more to choose from. Just pick which ones feel best to you! Crystal Placement for Inspiration Crystals have been used for human intentions for centuries. Folks use them to harness specific energies and amplify manifestation. Using them to cultivate specific energies in the workspace is nothing new. In the context of writing, using crystals in your workspace is not only a beautiful way to set the ambiance but also a practice that can help you align with your creative flow. Placing certain crystals nearby can serve as gentle reminders to refocus your energy, shift your mindset, or break through creative blocks. These crystals become more than just décor—they help create your personal sanctuary of inspiration! "Okay but which shiny rocks do I use?" you ask. It's all about intention! Amethyst : Enhances creativity and clarity. This stone can help you stay open to ideas and imaginative insights. Citrine : Often associated with confidence and manifestation, it’s said to promote a positive outlook and self-belief. Lapis Lazuli : A stone for wisdom and truth, often believed to aid clarity in thought and communication, which is essential for writers. Sodalite : Referred to as the “poet’s stone,” it enhances self-expression, creativity, and clear communication, making it great for overcoming writer’s block. Clear Quartz : Known as the “master healer,” it amplifies energy and focus, helping you power through challenging writing sessions. Carnelian : A stone of motivation and courage. Stimulates creativity and passion, encouraging you to take bold steps in your storytelling. Fluorite : Supports mental clarity, organization, and concentration, making it perfect for structuring complex plots or editing. Blue Lace Agate : Calms the mind and encourages clear, thoughtful communication. This, in turn, helps you articulate your ideas with ease. Rose Quartz : Associated with self-compassion and emotional healing, it can help you write from the heart and explore deep, personal themes. Aquamarine : Known for its calming properties, this stone helps reduce anxiety and promotes clear thinking — which is ideal for stress-free writing sessions. Black Tourmaline : Provides protection from negative energy and distractions, helping you focus on your work with a clear mind. Smoky Quartz : Grounding and stabilizing, it helps clear mental fog, making it easier to focus on your writing projects. Tiger’s Eye : Enhances confidence, willpower, and determination, which can be useful when tackling daunting writing projects or deadlines. Green Aventurine : Known for promoting growth and abundance, it helps you feel optimistic and open to new creative possibilities. Moonstone : Often called the “stone of new beginnings,” it supports intuition and emotional balance, great for exploring character arcs and story development. Garnet : A stone of passion and commitment, it can help rekindle your enthusiasm for writing and overcome creative fatigue. Pyrite : Known as “fool’s gold,” it boosts confidence and persistence, encouraging you to stay on track with your writing goals. Bloodstone : Provides courage, clarity, and resilience, making it an excellent choice for writers facing creative challenges or self-doubt. Now that you got them, what do you do with them? Consider the below: On Your Desk : Place small tumbled stones or crystal points near your computer or notebook to infuse your workspace with their energy. During Brainstorming : Hold a crystal in your hand or keep it in your pocket during brainstorming sessions to channel its properties directly. For instance, hold Amethyst for intuitive insights or Citrine for a confidence boost. In Meditation : Use crystals as focus objects during meditation before you start writing. Sit quietly with your chosen stone, breathe deeply, and set your intentions for the writing session ahead. This can help center your mind and spark creativity. Grids & Charts : Get more involved by creating crystal grids tailored to your creative goals. For example, use Clear Quartz, Citrine, and Lapis Lazuli in a triangular pattern to balance focus, manifestation, and communication. Placing a chart under your grid can help amplify the energy and direct it toward your intentions. Amber White at   Crystal Alchemy  and  Sara Cardinale at  Bloom and Manifest  have great articles about grids that explain everything for you. Tarot or Oracle Card Journaling There are a thousand and three videos, blogs, books, courses, and teachings of how to use tarot and oracle cards for your personal life. Since being a writer seeps into every crevice of your personal life, the lines can blur. When I reach a conundrum regarding my writing, I find it useful to reach for one of my tarot decks to see if spirit has any insight. By incorporating the cards, you can tap into archetypes, themes, and motifs that might otherwise go unnoticed in your plotting and character development. Since tarot cards are rich with imagery and layered meanings, making them a valuable resource for writers seeking inspiration. For example: Character Development : Drawing a card like "The Hermit" might inspire you to explore a character’s period of introspection or isolation, where they seek deeper truths or uncover hidden knowledge. On the other hand, a card like "The Lovers" could prompt you to delve into themes of connection, choice, or duality in relationships. Conflict and Tension : If you draw a card such as "The Five of Wands," it could suggest conflict, competition, or internal struggles between characters. This could inspire scenes where tensions rise, either internally within a character or externally among a group. Plot Twists and Climax : Cards like "The Wheel of Fortune" or "Death" (symbolizing transformation rather than literal death) can prompt you to think about major turning points in your story, where fate intervenes or a character undergoes a significant transformation. These could serve as catalysts for a plot twist or the climax of your narrative. Thematic Exploration : Using cards from an oracle deck with specific themes, such as "Healing," "Courage," or "Trust," can guide you to infuse your story with deeper thematic layers. For example, drawing a "Healing" card might lead you to explore a subplot where a character reconciles with their past or makes amends for past mistakes. Character Arcs : After drawing a card, ask yourself,   "How might this card reflect my character’s inner struggle or growth? Could it hint at a hidden aspect of their past?" Plot Development : Consider,   "If this card represents a plot event, how can I weave it into the story to create a pivotal moment? Could it introduce a new challenge or opportunity?" Setting and Atmosphere : Reflect on   "What atmosphere or tone does this card evoke? How can I use this imagery to enhance the mood of a scene or the world-building in my story?" Symbolic Imagery : Think about,   "What symbols or colors on this card stand out to me? How can I incorporate similar imagery into my descriptions or metaphors?" At the very least, pulling cards gives insight to where you're at because your translation is a projection. Consider having fun with the cards and using a pull as a simple writing prompt to get the creative juices flowing. Above all, keep an open mind as to what the cards have to say. Writing with the Moon Cycles The moon cycles have long been linked to cycles of growth and reflection. Aligning your writing process with these phases can offer a sense of flow and purpose. New Moon : marks the beginning of the lunar cycle when the moon is not visible from Earth. It symbolizes  new beginnings, fresh starts, and setting intentions . Waxing Crescent : As the moon begins to wax or grow larger, a thin crescent shape becomes visible. This phase represents  intentionality, growth, and brainstorming actionable goals regarding your New Moon manifestations. First Quarter : Halfway between the New Moon and the Full Moon, the First Quarter phase is about  making decisions to overcome the first round of obstacles and taking decisive action . Waxing Gibbous : During the Waxing Gibbous phase, the moon is nearly full, representing a period of  growth, momentum, and expansion . Full Moon : The Full Moon is the climax of the lunar cycle when the moon appears fully illuminated in the night sky. It symbolizes  completion, fruition, and illumination . Waning Gibbous : After the Full Moon, the moon begins to wane or decrease in size. The Waning Gibbous phase represents  reflection, gratitude, and releasing what no longer serves you . Last Quarter : Halfway between the Full Moon and the New Moon, the Last Quarter phase signifies  introspection, revision, and reassessment . Waning Crescent : As the moon approaches the end of its cycle, it appears as a thin crescent in the sky. The Waning Crescent phase symbolizes  surrender, rest, and introspection . I have so much more information about this and how I implemented the ritual myself in my blog post titled, Setting Your Writing Intentions by the Moon Conclusion While not every technique may resonate, trying different approaches to self-care can help you discover what truly aligns with your creative energy and nourishes your spirit. The journey is all about tuning into your intuition and experimenting with practices that ground and inspire you . Because you and your brain matter. So care for them. If you think pulling a tarot card for guidance "is weird" but you get some great guidance, is it still weird? If you have cringy feelings about working with the moon and it's been your most productive season yet, shouldn't that remove some doubts about your own abilities? It's not weird to set intentions under the light of a full moon unless you make it weird. It's not weird to light insence because it helps you write better short stories unless you make it weird. If it works, it works! Self care is experimenting with the a sacred act of honoring your inner muse. Embrace your own magic and listen to the whispers of your intuition. As you explore these practices, you’ll weave a spell of protection around your creativity, allowing it to flourish in ways that feel authentic and powerful . Trust in the ebb and flow, and remember that your self-care rituals are as unique and mystical as your own writing journey. The "woo woo" can be for you, too, Katherine Arkady

Introduction How many Hallmark movies have you watched where bakeries were in some sort of peril?  I’m talking about the small-town bakeries battling corporate buyouts. I’m talking about the struggling artisan who saves the family bakery just  in time for Christmas. The big-city professional who trades power suits for pastries and finds love in the process. The underdog pastry chef who must win a high-stakes baking competition to keep the ovens running. The "bakery in peril" trope is practically its own genre. But how much of it reflects real life? And, if you’re writing about a bakery, how do you separate sweet fiction from the daily grind? You get it from the source! I reached out to area bakers and requested an email interview. Julie and Ran Rabinovitz of Tasty Bakery in Ann Arbor were very gracious to say yes and very generous to answer my questions. But first, what is Tasty Bakery? Tasty Bakery Owners Julie and Ran | photo by Tyra Overby According to their About Me page on their website, " Tasty Bakery is a dedicated gluten-free establishment in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their mission is to offer products that can be enjoyed by everyone whether they are gluten intolerant or not. All of their products are gluten-free, soy-free, and corn-free. They also offer grain-free, dairy-free, vegan, and low-glycemic options. Their high-quality artisan baked goods are indiscernible from any traditional glutinous baked goods."  With this in mind and, after researching Tasty Bakery to get all of the googleable questions out of the way — let's remember the lesson from my Tattoo Artist Interview — I asked the following questions: Interview Questions:  1. Your gluten-free bakery started at a local farmer’s market before growing into a brick-and-mortar shop. If a writer were crafting a character with this journey, what key struggles or triumphs should they highlight?  First of all, it was really difficult finding a commercial kitchen. My circumstances were also different than most bakers, as I couldn’t really share a kitchen with someone unless they were not using gluten.  Another struggle was finding our brick-and-mortar location. We were looking into various locations that would have required building out a kitchen which would have been a huge expense. We were lucky to have a friend from the farmers’ market who knew we were looking. She was ready to stop using her commercial kitchen full time and had us pick up her lease. It’s the location we are in now.  I think the biggest obstacle though is finding employees. When I first started, people I met at the farmers’ market came to me asking for a job, or I found someone from a friend or acquaintance. Covid made that much more difficult; finding employees was very competitive. We want people who appreciate what we’re doing for our community and want to learn about it and be empathetic to our customers.  2. What are some key differences between baking at home and baking professionally in a bakery?  Space!!! I LOVE our kitchen. We have all the ingredients easily accessible in big bins, we have big pans, all the equipment and tools, and I don’t mind doing dishes because we have a three-compartment sink which is very efficient, way better than doing dishes at home.  3. Many fictional bakers have “secret recipes.” In real life, what goes into developing a truly unique gluten-free recipe, and how long does it take to perfect one? Are they ever truly "perfect"?  My goal when I started 16 years ago was to provide products that were indiscernible from anything with gluten. That wasn’t so difficult because I found a gluten-free flour that I really liked. Adding tasty vegan to the gluten-free repertoire has been trickier. We try to use only “clean” ingredients which also changes things. I often rely on researching those who have already done the work. I just tweak the recipes to make them exactly how I want them.  I really try to only introduce products that get a good response from testing, otherwise it won’t be in our inventory.  4. What are the physical and mental demands of baking that writers should be aware of when creating a baker character?  Our bakery is a bit different in that we are very laid back, and we have fun. I’ve heard of people who have had things thrown at them from the chef when they were mad. That is not us. We know how valuable our employees are, and we know everyone makes mistakes, including us. Other than the winter months, we are consistently busy. We pretty much work from the minute we get in the door, to cleaning up at the end of the day. It is pretty exhausting, especially for me since I will soon be 60.  5. In fiction, bakers often work solo, but in reality, how much of baking is a team effort? What roles do different people play in a professional kitchen?  Our staff performs all the roles that I do at the bakery: opening the store, baking, waiting on customers, wrapping & labeling product and getting it ready for the store or to go to our wholesale accounts, stocking, washing dishes, and cleaning up. (They are better at some of those things than I am!) I have one day a week that I get to work by myself, (and maybe with my husband). That is the day I try and experiment with a new recipe if I have time.    6. Are there any unusual baking terms, traditions, or superstitions that writers might find interesting?  I cannot think of anything, except one that I just learned: for instance, someone saying “we are out of eggs” and the person needs to say back “heard” so it’s understood. However, that’s probably pretty basic. lol  7. With your start at the farmer's market, your crowdfunding success, and nearly ten (woohoo!) years of operating the bakery, what does it mean to you to be embraced by your community? Do you feel you’re able to return that embrace?  Our bakery business isn’t super profitable. However, the love that I/we get from people who appreciate what we do is priceless. I feel honored that we can provide treats, or cakes + catering for events, for those who cannot just go anywhere and get a treat due to their food allergies, or beliefs (vegan).  8. What resources do you use that writers could utilize for their research? (For example: websites, textbooks, industry journals, professional organizations, or official guidelines.)  Here are some of my favorite cookbooks and websites in the order that I started:  Original recipes that I already had and converted to gluten free The BabyCakes  cookbooks by Erin McKenna  Flying Apron's Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book  by Jennifer Katzinger Minimalist Baker, an online community at www.minimalistbaker.com   The Unconventional Baker, operated by baker, blogger, and author Audrey Snowe at www.unconventionalbaker.com Smitten Kitchen operated by Deb Perelman at www.smittenkitchen.com  (converted to Gluten-Free) The Loopy Whisk run by recipe developer, writer, and science nerd, Katarina Cermelj at www.theloopywhisk.com The Bakery Visit I have a massive sweet tooth and have a second stomach for desserts, so the idea of visiting Tasty Bakery was in the forefront of my mind when conducting this interview. Now, I’m not gluten-free myself, but, in my experience, the work of bakers that are gluten-free ABSOLUTELY shows in their creations. Tasty Bakery has 76 five-star reviews on Google that would agree. But can I rely on secondary sources for my research? Not when there are sweets and savories involved! I had to get the primary sources myself, you see. I asked Julie, “Any personal favorites or bestsellers you’d recommend for a first-time visitor?” She responded: “ Our berry bars are our best sellers. However, I’m more of a chocolate chip cookie or brownie person myself. ;))” With that directive in mind, I drove myself and my boyfriend to Ann Arbor to visit Tasty Bakery at 416 W Huron St #24, Ann Arbor, MI 48103 . They're tucked into a cute nook that I imagine would be even cuter once the flora comes alive. But once inside...! I've been to bakeries before, but this bakery held an intangible feeling to it. Everything about it was handled with care and love. You walk in and feel cozy with the handmade décor. There's a corner for kiddos to color and you bet they hang the creations on the wall. Artwork was either in thanks of making such tasty sweets or in promotion of the "Anti-Gluten Club." We were warmly greeted by Ran, co-owner and husband to Julie. He first asked if we had any allergies (damn Cinnamon) , and gladly explained their process of creation. I paid attention to the best of my abilities but, dear readers, when there is a case full of sweets and savories, my mind is prone to wander. The long and the short of it is that they carefully source their materials from reputable places like Golden Prairie Oats and Mindo Chocolate that guarantee no cross contamination. Their entire kitchen is carefully prepared for baking the goods so that any treat can be the treat for you. I think I blacked out while ordering because we left with a bag of three Berry Bars, an Intense Fudge Brownie, a Lemon Cloud cookie, and a bag of Sea Salt Rosemary Crackers. Here's the descriptive breakdown: Intense Fudge Brownie: Boyfriend and I ate it in silence. It was that good. Best brownie I’ve had in recent years, gluten-free or not. It had the “Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mint Effect” where you could keep eating it and not get sick of the decadence. The way the flavor developed as you were chewing it had me regretting only getting one. I pulled off the chocolate "shell" on the top and didn't let the boyfriend have any. Sorry not sorry. Lemon Cloud Cookie: A burst of lemon in the best way. This cookie was a bright taste of spring. And the way it was both crispy and chewy? It was an artful bite. The glaze was the cherry on top. I'd gladly eat just that off of a spoon. Berry Bars: Are best sellers for a reason! The boyfriend dubbed them with a tagline of "berry good!" It was the right amount of sweet but not too sweet. The first bite was great but the second was better and the third was better than that and the fourth, well, if you didn't eat the bars in only four bites, you've got far more self-discipline than me. Do yourself a favor and get the bag of three. It 's the perfect breakfast bar, the perfect snack bar, the perfect dessert bar, the perfect midnight snack bar... Sea Salt Rosemary Crackers: A third of the crackers were gone before I finished reading the luscious list of ingredients. They had the right crisp to them but still kept their substance. The (Michigan sourced!) rosemary was full of flavor but didn't overpower. It was a bite of summer. My only regret with these is not getting three bags. While you have to have baked goods to be a bakery, not all bakeries have that intangible something that make it a community pillar like Tasty Bakery. My interaction with Ran wasn't that of a big box store that just wants you to get your stuff and get out. Ran was full of conversation for us. He asked what we like, made more recommendations (that you bet we took!), and took it a step further to suggest local places for my boyfriend and I to visit while we were in town. These are people that care. They care about their creations. They care about who is eating the creations. They care about the bigger picture of inclusion and the communion of eating sweets that are mindfully made. These details are the things worth writing about. And you need to go to the source to get them. Find Out More About Tasty Bakery Website: https://www.tastysansgluten.com Instagram: @ tastybakerya2 Facebook: facebook.com/TastyBakeryA2 Stop in! If you're in the area, treat yourself with a visit to this cozy spot. Even if you're not in the area, make a trip out like I did! You won't regret it. It's the spot for folk with dietary restrictions and it's the spot for folk that want to be mindful about what they're eating. Conclusion Be mindful with the details of research like Julie and Ran are mindful with their baked goods. They carefully source their materials for baking like writers could carefully source their information for stories. They test recipes and get feedback like writers should experiment with drafts and get critiques. They look into other cooking resources like writers should look into other writing sources (like this one!). They think about every detail from conception to the last bite like writers should think about every detail from conception to the last page. And it makes all the difference in the experience. The details is where it gets sweet, Katherine Arkady

Mark Twain is quoted saying, “I apologize for such a long letter — I didn't have time to write a short one.” We writers, despite our complaints of staring at a blank page, also suffer through the other extreme of writing way too much. The first draft of my first serious manuscript was "complete" at 150,000 words. Publishers wouldn't look at that. It was my job to whittle it down to the important parts. Why describe a situation in ten words when you can do it well in five? More specifically, and the reason for creating this blog post: Why not take advantage of the many meanings one word can have? Enter, ✨ zeugma . ✨ "God bless you," you say. No, no . It's a real term. Zeugma , derived from the Greek word "zeugnynai," meaning "to join," occurs when a single word—usually a verb or an adjective—links multiple nouns or phrases, each of which may have a different meaning or grammatical function. This device can add depth and creativity to writing, allowing for a more nuanced expression of ideas. Consolidation 🤝 Nuance Zeugma feels good to think and to say. It adds rhythm to sentences and can create a punchy effect. You add layers of meaning in a tasty little cake with surprising and clever combinations to capture reader's attention. Overall, the use of zeugma should engage readers by making them think about the connections between different ideas. There are two different flavors of Zeugma : Grammatical Zeugma : This occurs when a verb or an adjective applies to more than one noun, with each noun having a different meaning. For example: "She broke his heart and his bank account." Here, "broke" applies to both "heart" and "bank account," creating a juxtaposition between emotional and financial loss. Rhetorical Zeugma : This type focuses more on the effect or emotional impact of the words rather than strict grammatical correctness. An example is: "He lost his coat and his temper." The loss of a physical object is paired with the loss of composure, illustrating two different emotional states. Where have you seen this in literature? EVERYWHERE! Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist “He seized the glass and the opportunity.” This example highlights how "seized" connects both a physical object and an abstract concept. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Here, "measured" links the literal act of measuring with the metaphorical concept of life. T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock “I have known them all already, known them all—have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons.” The repetition of "known" creates a rhythm while connecting different times of day. John Milton, Paradise Lost “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” In this biblical context, "made" links the creation of the day with the act of rejoicing. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer “Tom had a good time, but he had trouble with the law.” The phrase “had” connects two very different experiences, emphasizing the contrast. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” The verb “bind” connects multiple actions that emphasize the ring’s power. Even in films? YES! The Godfather (1972) “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” In this iconic line, "make" applies to both the offer and the implication of coercion, showcasing the dual meaning. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” The word “miss” links both the act of missing a moment and the experience of life itself. Deadpool (2016) “I’m not a hero. I’m a high-functioning sociopath.” The phrase “I’m a” connects both identity statements, creating a humorous contrast. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) “Get busy living or get busy dying.” “Get busy” links both the act of living and the inevitability of death, creating a powerful choice. Pulp Fiction (1994) “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass.” “Get” connects the action with a historical reference, creating a striking visual. How can writers use zeugma in their writing? I have some things for you to consider: Choose the Governing Word Wisely Consider the Context : Think about the overall theme or mood of your piece. A governing word should not only be relevant but also enhance the meaning of the sentence. For example, in a serious narrative, using a verb with strong emotional weight can evoke deeper feelings. Aim for Versatility : Select verbs or adjectives that have multiple meanings or can work in different contexts. Words like "held," "carried," or "dropped" can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. For instance: “He held his breath and her gaze.” Here, "held" works in both a physical and emotional sense. Balance Clarity and Surprise : While it’s great to be clever, clarity is crucial. Your readers should still understand the sentence’s meaning without getting lost in the complexity. Aim for a combination that feels fresh yet straightforward. Experiment with Humor Juxtapose Contrasting Ideas : One of the best ways to create humor with zeugma is by linking ideas that don’t traditionally go together. This unexpected pairing can elicit a chuckle or a smile. For instance: “He lost his keys and his mind.” The absurdity of losing one’s mind alongside a mundane object can be quite funny. Utilize Wordplay : Play with the meanings of your governing word. For example, using “ran” can refer to both a physical action and a situation getting out of control: “She ran the race and her reputation into the ground.” Consider Tone : Make sure the humor fits the tone of your piece. If you’re writing a light-hearted story or a comedic piece, don’t hesitate to lean into the humor with your zeugma . Create Vivid Imagery Link Physical Actions with Abstract Concepts : By connecting tangible actions with intangible feelings, you create richer imagery. This can enhance your writing by making it more relatable and impactful. For example: “The storm raged and her emotions swirled.” Use Descriptive Language : Pair your governing word with strong adjectives or adverbs to amplify the imagery. Instead of simply saying “ran,” you might say: “He sprinted through the rain and his fears.” Engage the Senses : Think about how your words can evoke sensory experiences. Using zeugma to describe sensations can pull readers deeper into the narrative. For instance: “She savored the chocolate and the moment.” This sentence connects the act of tasting with enjoying a significant experience. There are such terms as diazeugma, hypozeugma, mesozeugma, prozeugma, and protozeugma , which follow this general rule of thinking, but I'll only assign those terms to those in need of a new hyperfixation. So, the next time you’re crafting a sentence, consider how zeugma might help you convey your message with flair! Take advantage of the many meanings of a word! Many meanings herself but always her own governing word, Katherine Arkady

Introduction What happens when the faith community you’ve always known turns out to be something far more controlling—and dangerous? In this episode of Takes One to Write One , I speak with a guest who grew up in a high-control religious group that, over time, revealed itself to be a cult. They share their firsthand experience of indoctrination, strict rules, financial exploitation, and the emotional toll of leaving. This conversation is raw, honest, and sometimes difficult to hear, but it’s an important look at how these groups operate and the lasting impact they have. If you’ve ever wondered how people get drawn into these organizations—or what it takes to escape—this episode is for you. Here's a link to the podcast episode on my website. Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all other major platforms! Timestamps 00:00:27  Trigger Warnings: coercion, trauma, physical assault, psychological manipulation, spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, self-harm, suicide, and gaslighting. 00:02:05  Did the cult have a name, or was it a cult? 00:04:26 What are your first memories or experiences with being in the organization? 00:06:20  Who was doing the homeschooling? 00:08:40  I imagine in an unfortunate circumstance, you got really good at knowing the Bible verses. 00:09:20  Bible verses for discipline 00:10:51  With these church services, were they the same no matter what day of the week or were they like, it's Monday, so this day is about this? 00:11:55  What's the difference between the kids' service and the adult service? 00:13:40  Could you elaborate more on these responsibilities? 00:16:14  How did your parents get involved? 00:17:37  Matchmaking 00:19:14  The bible taught the Rule of Thumb  00:20:40  What would you experience in these church services? 00:23:31  Would anybody who's been at a church service be able to find similarities with the church services that you attended? 00:25:09  What was the view with working— having an unrelated job? 00:25:25  Members of the church, what sort of jobs did they have? 00:26:42  Tithing with 10 percent but definitely more  00:29:44  With these clothes, was it retail stores that you went to? Were they made sewn? 00:30:20  Was there like a uniform, like were there specific things that you needed to wear? 00:31:02  If I were to put a dollar at the top of my knee, the shorts had to be longer than where the dollar ended going up my knee. 00:32:07  Carrying religious traumas  00:32:56  What was youth group like? 00:35:28  What does one do to become a leader? 00:37:29  So overall, in the grand scheme of things, rather recently, a couple of years ago and I was like, hey, this is a cult, right? 00:39:35  Because one does not simply leave a cult, they just replace it. 00:39:53  What was the difference between the original and now the new or second? 00:40:39  Are these cults still operating? 00:41:06  You mentioned at the church services that people questioned commitment. What was that verbiage like? 00:42:57  Was the pastor who was getting all the money, who was clearly not doing what he was saying he was going to do with the money, was he living a flashier life than the rest of the members? 00:44:58  So, you were with this group, always doing stuff, always keeping busy, studying, doing X, Y, Z. And then you mentioned how isolating it was at the same time. I imagine there wasn't mental health support of, hey, you're feeling this way. 00:46:08  Was there a big presence of Satan? 00:46:57  Let's take a break Key Takeaways: Cult vs. Church – A Blurred Line: Many groups that operate under the guise of religious communities share high-control tactics with what we traditionally define as cults. The guest reflects on the realization that what they were part of was, in fact, a cult. Childhood Indoctrination: Early memories revolved around strict homeschooling, Bible memorization, and discipline tied to religious teachings. These environments shaped not only beliefs but also behavior, often using fear-based tactics. Strict Gender Roles & Control Over Daily Life: From clothing restrictions to matchmaking, the group imposed rigid rules, particularly on women. The "Rule of Thumb" and other oppressive ideologies dictated personal freedoms. Financial Exploitation: Tithing was required—often beyond 10%—and the church leaders benefited financially while lower-ranking members struggled. Questions about where the money went were met with scrutiny. Isolation & Emotional Manipulation: Despite being constantly surrounded by community members, the guest described feeling deeply isolated. Mental health was dismissed, and any doubts about the group’s teachings were met with pressure to "prove" commitment. Leaving Isn’t Simple – It’s a Process: The guest touches on the difficulty of leaving a cult. Many who leave one high-control group unknowingly seek another to fill the void. Deconstruction takes time. The Cult Still Exists: Despite recognizing its harmful practices, the guest confirms that versions of this group continue to operate, with similar tactics used to recruit and control members. Editor's Note: Stories of high-control groups, whether fictional or nonfictional, are deeply layered—they’re not just about the rules and restrictions but about the people who live under them. The psychology of control, the slow erosion of autonomy, the tension between faith and fear—these are all elements that can bring authenticity to a story. If you’re a writer exploring cults or coercion in your work, consider the human side of these experiences . How does belief shift over time? What small moments spark doubt? How does isolation warp a character’s sense of reality? Survival isn’t just about physically escaping—it’s about reclaiming identity, critical thinking, and trust. This episode isn’t just an account of what happened; it’s a map of emotional landscapes that can be explored in fiction. If you’re writing about these topics, approach them with care, research, and an understanding of the deep impact they leave on a person’s life. Links & Resources: Support Groups People Leave Cults : offers information and services for cult intervention, cult recovery, and cult support groups. They serve current and former cult members, their family, friends, and loved ones Cult Recovery 101 : Has an excellent directory of organizations for cult recovery The National Association of Forensic Counselors has extensive Information on Cults and Support for Former Cult Members Books on Cults & High-Control Groups (For Research & Inspiration) "Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism" by Amanda Montell  – A deep dive into how language is used to manipulate and control within cults and cult-like organizations. "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker  – Explores how manipulation and control tactics work, especially in coercive environments. "A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown" by Julia Scheeres  – A well-researched account of one of history’s most infamous cults. "Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control" by Luna Lindsey  – Focuses on mind control techniques within religious groups, applicable for understanding coercion in storytelling. Writing Guides & Storytelling Resources "The Writer’s Guide to Psychology" by Carolyn Kaufman  – Helps writers accurately depict psychological manipulation and trauma. Sensitivity Reader Directories  – If a writer wants to ensure they’re handling cult survivors’ experiences respectfully, a sensitivity reader can help. Consider having a reader look through your story to ensure you're hitting the right chords without doing any damage. International Cultic Studies Association has an online library of articles, book reviews, periodicals, and plenty other resources divided by topics including (but definitely not limited to) Born or Raised in Cultic Groups (SGAs)  , Cultic Therapies , Cults 101 , Ethical Issues , Families , Former Group Members , Government and Public Policy , Personal Accounts , Political Cultism , and Social Influence . And they hold conferences! Coping With Cult Involvement: A Handbook for Families and Friends (Second Edition) by Livia Bardin, M.S.W. Question, listen, write with intention, Katherine Arkady

Introduction They should have seen it coming.  The signs were there—the tiny inconsistencies, the moments that didn’t quite add up. But they ignored them. Believed  in the person who swore they’d never lie. Trusted in the truth they thought was unshakable. And now? The floor has dropped out from under them. This is the moment where everything  changes. The breath-stopping, heart-crushing, blood-boiling realization that they’ve been deceived. Maybe it’s betrayal. Maybe it’s a revelation so big it rewrites their entire world. Either way, they’re not walking away from this moment the same person. And you ? You’re here to write every. agonizing. second. of it. You need a playlist that lingers like a ghost, tightens in the chest, and makes the weight of the moment unforgettable.  Hit play. It’s time to shatter their reality. Scroll to the bottom for writing tips! The Set List Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: III. Sequenz, No. 6, Lacrymosa David Parry, Andrej Kucharsky, Catherine Bremen, Elisabeth Santi, Todd Donovan, London Philharmonic Orchestra & London Philharmonic Choir  & Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music Blinding Florence + The Machine Lungs (Digital Deluxe Version) The Other Side Of Paradise Glass Animals How To Be A Human Being Black Out Days Phantogram Voices Love Is to Die Warpaint Warpaint Gimme Shelter The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed Reflections The Neighbourhood Hard To Imagine The Neighbourhood Ever Changing Little Lies (2002 Remaster) Fleetwood Mac The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac Black Mirror Arcade Fire Neon Bible Paint It, Black The Rolling Stones Aftermath I wrote a blog about Obscure Literary Terms regarding Anagnorisis . Anagnorisis is when a protagonist recognized their true nature or their identity, or a significant truth about their world. Read more in that post to get a better idea of how it's been used in movies and books. But, in the mean time... Writing Tips for a DEVASTATING Revelation Scene Make the Truth Hurt Personally This shouldn’t just be a plot twist —it should shake the foundation of who they are. Did they trust the wrong person? Fight for the wrong side? Were they used ? Make it cut deep. Let the Physical Reactions Speak A single step back. A breath caught in their throat. A hand trembling. Silence.  Sometimes no reaction hits harder  than a scream. If they do explode? Make it visceral—knocking things over, clutching their chest, shaking with fury. Tom Wambsgams from Succession when he finds out that he's not going to jail comes to mind, though he's more psyched than anything. Hell, that might work in your favor. It's so unhinged that it'll have your readers looking like poor Greg. Show the Puzzle Pieces Clicking Into Place Readers love that moment  when everything suddenly makes sense. Flashbacks, past conversations, details that seemed small before —bring them all back with a new, devastating meaning. What’s Their Immediate Reaction? Do they demand answers? Lash out? Run? Shut down completely? The reaction should be unique to who they are —an emotional character might sob, a vengeful one might start plotting immediately. If they’re in denial, let them fight the truth  before they finally break. Drag It Out… or Drop It HARD Slow-burn shock  – They start noticing little inconsistencies… and then it snowballs  into the awful truth. BAM, reality check  – One moment. One sentence. And suddenly, nothing will ever be the same. Links to My Playlist Profiles YouTube Music Profile   | Spotify Profile Read between the lines, Katherine Arkady

Book Information What is the title of the book? Swans of Fifth Avenue Who is the author of the book? Melanie Benjamin When was the book published? October 25, 2016 What genre does the book belong to? Historical Fiction Are there any notable awards or recognitions the book has received? Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction (2016) People’s Book of the Week USA Today’s #1 “New and Noteworthy” Book Entertainment Weekly’s Must List LibraryReads Top Ten Pick What is the main plot or argument of the book? According to GoodReads: "Truman Capote’s scandalous, headline-making, and heart-wrenching friendship with Babe Paley and New York’s society “swans” of the 1950s. Centered on two dynamic, complicated, and compelling protagonists—Truman Capote and Babe Paley—this book is steeped in the glamour and perfumed and smoky atmosphere of New York’s high society. Babe Paley—known for her high-profile marriage to CBS founder William Paley and her ranking in the International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame—was one of the reigning monarchs of New York’s high society in the 1950s. Replete with gossip, scandal, betrayal, and a vibrant cast of real-life supporting characters, readers will be seduced by this startling new look at the infamous society swans." What is the setting of the book (time and place)? New York 1950s-1970s What are the major events or points discussed in the book? Truman Capote wrote a story called  La Côte Basque, 1965  and  Esquire  published it in the November 1975 edition of their magazine. It read like gossip with thinly-veiled name changes and enough details to prove everything Truman claimed about the women of New York society was true. This novel goes into the before and after of Truman's relationship with the "Swans" these women he was supposedly super close with. Who are the main characters? Truman Capote : Role : A charismatic, talented, and often controversial writer who becomes the darling of New York’s high society. Character Traits : Charming, witty, and manipulative, but also deeply insecure and ultimately self-destructive. Babe Paley : Role : The epitome of elegance and style, she is the wife of CBS founder William S. Paley and one of Truman Capote’s closest friends. Character Traits: Graceful, beautiful, and the queen of New York society, but also deeply lonely and vulnerable. Slim Keith (Nancy "Slim" Keith) : Role : A chic and sophisticated socialite, one of the central figures in Truman Capote’s circle.        Character Traits : Stylish, sharp-tongued, and strong-willed. Harboring her own personal sorrows. Pamela Churchill Harriman : Role : An ambitious and influential socialite with a knack for reinvention and climbing the social ladder. Character Traits : Charismatic, resourceful, and determined. Always seeking to enhance her position in society. C. Z. Guest : Role : A glamorous socialite known for her elegance and gardening expertise, another member of Capote’s inner circle. Character Traits : Elegant, composed, and confident. Maintans a distance from the drama around her. Gloria Guinness :        Role : A wealthy and beautiful socialite, often admired for her fashion sense and style. Character Traits : Enigmatic, stylish, and poised. Has a complex personal life behind her public image.    Marella Agnelli : Role : An Italian princess and socialite, known for her sophistication and connection to the European aristocracy. Character Traits : Sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and reserved, with distinct European flair. Book Club Questions 1. The Swans all have very complicated relationships with one another—perhaps most notably, Slim and Pamela were both married to the same man. What ties these women together, despite their differences and the sometimes competitive nature of their friendships? All of these women, at some point in their lives, figured out that the way to success in those days was through a man. Those that figured it out later were more bitter than the ones who figured this out early on. Babe found out how men lie in her first marriage. On page 33 , "Then Babe divorced Stanley Mortimer...there were rumors that he hit her, plus all his money was tied up in trust, which Babe didn't know about before the marriage." Gloria figured this out while young. She, on page 81 , explains, "Once she had a little money from working in the local dance hall, where a man would grab the first available girl like he was catching a pollo in a yard, was to buy cream to rub into her feet every night, so that someday, when she slept with the kind of man who would notice, they would be smooth, soft as velvet: aristocratic feet. "How the first time she did sleep with the kind of man who would notice, he didn't. But he did notice her hands, her nails, and so then she started spending time on them, too. Pinching peso — stealing pesos — to buy more creams, a pumice stone. How she learned to view her body as a man would, by sleeping with many men, many different men. The other girls dressed and preened for one another, but Gloria soon recognized there was no currency in that. She must stand out, be the one men wanted, because men, at their most vulnerable...would pay." Pamela page 88 , learned early on that "Men, the dear boys, did need to be taken care of, and American women were particularly bad at that, so intent on having their own fun...British women, well, the were born knowing how to take care of men, their own — and everybody else's." Then goes on to say that she had grown up with the gift. Slim had a thing and got "Daddy figures" on page 86 . The men showed her new heights of society. C.Z., on page 160 reminisced about her oats being sown while trying to get away from society, but, "After all those wandering couple of years, she'd hightailed it home, back to the safety of money and privilege and class, married Winston Guest, much older but so damn handsome, a polo player of international renown and possessor of a great fortune and even greater pedigree, and she's resumed the life mapped out for her from birth." So, because success is, at this time, through a man, they're competing for success by either acquiring money, status, or karmic comeuppance in the case of Pamela and Slim. It's an unfortunate way to frame one's success by the hand of another, but that's what the times were like. So glad it's nothing like that today. (Side eye) Right? (Side eye) 2. Truman is embraced wholeheartedly by the swans when he first appears on the New York social scene. What do you think draws them to him? It's perfectly summarized on page 244 : "And that was the secret, the wonder of Truman, [Gloria] realized suddenly...Their husbands didn't want to talk to them. [The Swans] grew bored talking to one another, these glorious creatures, for they were all the same. Blonde brunette, tall, short, European or Californian, they were all the same; only the exteriors were different. and they devoted their lives to maintaining this difference, striving to shine, be the jewel who stood out. Yet at night, they took off the diamonds and gowns and went to empty beds resigned to the fact that they were just women, after all. Women with a shelf life. "And then Truman leapt into their midst, and suddenly the gossip was more delicious, the amusements more diverse. He had sat on the beds of every one of his swans and whispered how beautiful she was, how precious, how devoted he was to her and her alone, and even though they all knew he was saying the same thing to each one of them, they didn't mind. Because, beneath the beauty, they were all so goddamned lonely." He's not like the other men! (Spoiler alert, he's exactly like other men.) Truman was the sassy mold-breaker of what was expected of men, so the ladies could break their usual molds and be vulnerable and open with him. They were  craving  somebody like Truman and when he finally came along, they fought over him. On page 6 :  "I introduced you to him first," Slim reminded Babe after that fateful weekend jaunt to the Paley's home in Jamaica; that startling, stunning weekend when Babe and Truman had found themselves blinking at the first dazzling sunrise of friendship."  This was when Truman was working on the screenplay of  Beat the Devil  and her husband had had Truman over for dinner. "No, it was I who first discovered him," Gloria insisted." And she claimed it was soon after Truman adapted The Grass Harp for Broadway. She went to opening night. "My dear, no. I invited him for the weekend, in Paris, don't you recall?" Pamela broke in." This was allegedly back when Truman had published Other Voices, Other Rooms. C.Z claims that she introduced Truman to Babe during a Bergdorf shopping spree Marella claims that the introduction happened when they were all on her yacht. But,"Babe Paley, cool in a blue linen Chanel suit that did not crease, no matter the radiator heat of a new York summer, didn't reply." I think that this is because Babe knew she had Truman. All the women needed ownership of the friendship that mattered most to them. It's just unfortunate that Truman exploited the friendship and trust of the ladies to get ahead in his career. 3. Discuss Babe’s marriage with Bill. What are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? Bill is always hungry and Babe was happy to feed him in one way, but wanted him to starve in another — more on the latter later. In Chapter 8, Bill wakes up hungry and the reader learns that Babe has gone above and beyond to make sure that Bill has a buffet — a literal buffet! — of food available to him at all hours: page 91 "Bill couldn't remember a time when he didn't rise and think, first thing before his feet hit the floor, What am I going to have for dinner? And, of course, before dinner there was breakfast, lunch, snack after snack, dinner after dinner, even; invariably, he was ravenous again around midnight, and Babe had installed a separate kitchen off his bedroom in all their homes, completely stocked with eggs and cheeses and salamis and breads, cookies, sliced vegetables, whole roasted chickens in the refrigerator." At this point, he's making a sandwich at his office because he also has a kitchenette in his office.  "This, too, was always stocked by someone. Maybe Babe; he didn't really know." The making of the sandwich while he mentally reviews why he married Babe in the first place is the distant cousin of a character looking at themselves in a mirror to describe to the reader what they look like. Distant cousin, because Bill is so full of himself that of course he only ever thinks about himself — even while making a sandwich. The reader learns he doesn't like society. pages 92-93 "He hated society, to tell the truth. Even as he yearned for it, collected it, wore it around his neck like a medal. He craved acceptance, he craved the sensation of knowing that he was the most sought after; he and Babe that is. The Paleys. Mr. and Mrs. The richest, most beautiful most glamorous couple in New York. That's what he wanted. He just didn't want to have to put up with some of the exhausting exercises required to attain his desire, that was all. He left most of it up to Babe, and simply waited for her to tell him what was required of him.... But that's why he married Babe in the first place, wasn't it? Because she knew society, she knew how to navigate it easily, not clumsily; Babe knew where to go and with whom to be seen. Although it wasn't as if he's been some rube off the turnip truck when he'd met her; he was already William S. Paley, chairman of CBS. His first wife, Dorothy, had polished the rough edges, shown him how to dress, where to live, introduced him to art, to performers, politicians, artists; he'd selected her for the job, just as he'd selected Babe, later on, and Fred Friendly to run the news division, and countless other employees, even the most admired faces in the land. They were all his employees, wives included; the famous men and women of CBS, whom he could call on whenever and wherever and they'd show up." Which is such a depressing way to think about marriage. And Babe was wiling to serve him. Literally! In Chapter 3, Truman is at Babe's house. They're having fun until she realizes the time. page 22 "Oh! It can't be seven!...Bill will be home any minute and I'm not ready to greet him. She sits herself at her vanity stool in her "Aladdin's cave" of a closet. Babe explains to Truman: "I always remove my makeup and reapply it just for him." Apparently, she is late at greeting Bill because he meets them at her closet door. She immediately turns into a lovestruck fool with all of her: page 25 :  "Oh I'm so glad you're home. I've simply been bored all day without you. Would you like a drink, darling? I know you would. I'll get it in a jiffy." This is all in Truman's POV. He notices that Bill doesn't smile until Babe lavishly tells him what's for dinner. Because she's not ready, Bill decides to show Truman all of his rich things in the drawing room. When Babe returns to them, she is perfect: "Serene as ever. Wearing a column of silk, draped about her tall form like an exquisitely tailored toga, the neckline a deep slash to her sternum, a slim black belt encircling her nonexistent waist. Her makeup was perfect; not a hair out of place. She looked as if she could glide into the Plaza ballroom." Okay, so Babe's gorgeous, a picture of wealth and beauty. She's even sewn jingle bells into the hem of her couture gown. She's doing everything she can to impress her husband. She makes sure the lighting is even to perfection. And Bill doesn't care. Even when she is literally page 27 : "settling down at her husband's feet, her skirt rusting a musical crescendo, to remove his shoes, massage his insteps, and suggest, 'Now tell me about your day, my darling. I want to know every detail. You look as if you've been through the ringer, poor baby.'" Ugh. Bill doesn't even respond to her! He just studies Truman. page 27 : "And Truman, watching the scene frowned. His goddess, turned into a mere housewife. "If this is what her mother had trained her for, then God damn her soul." Babe Paley  was  trained for this! In Chapter 4, in  The Story of the Three Beautiful Cushing Sisters,  we learn about the marriage history of the three girls, specifically Babe's. Her coming-out-party was at the White House because her older sister, Betsey, was FDR's daughter-in-law. The Cushing girls were everywhere important in New York and were documented in the newspapers. Babe worked at  Bazaar  and then  Vogue  as a fashion editor. She was a career woman going on shoots, modeling, and having a ball. Her mother, Gogs, as she was called by the sisters, made sure that she got married to Stanley Mortimer, Standard Oil heir. They divorced. page 33 :  "Well, she had to! He came back from war an absolute wreck...There were rumors that he hit her, plus all his money was tied up in trust, which Babe din't know before the marriage. But Babe, true to her mother's training, never let on. Those girls were bred, you see. Bred! Like show horses! Appearances matter most...No troubles...Stick together, put on a happy — perfectly made-up — face!" In Chapter Five, we hear Babe's anxiety's about always hearing her mother's voice in her head: page 44 : "Sit up straight." Don't fidget." "Write a thank-you note the minute you receive a gift or return home from a party." "Always have fresh flowers, no matter the cost." Which, I can get behind some of these, but then they just unravel into trauma: page 45 : "Be a perfect little angel for Papa, because he's so rarely home, and when he is, he wants to see only the best of you." "Be a perfect little debutante because sister Betsey is now married to the president's son." "Be a perfect little wife to Stanley, because he's old money. Tuxedo Park." "Be a perfect wife to Bill, even if he is a Jew. Because that's what he's paying for, and if you're not perfect, he'll replace you so fast your head will spin, and then where will you be? Divorced twice, with four children and no money of your own." "Be perfect. Because that's what people expect of you now. Because what are you, if not that?  Who are you? " Like damn. And Bill, while he's a huge dick, was kind of also designed by society to be that way, too: Back in the sandwich making Chapter 8, Bill continues to think about his career. His father and Uncle Jake had a thriving cigar business. He was starting at the "bottom" with the laborers because that's what his father did. While Bill's dad and Uncle were on a buying trip to Cuba, Bill approached a local radio station about sponsoring a show,  The La Palina Hour . Sales "went through the roof." page 94 "How did he know? Instinct. Gut instinct, from deep within that stomach he so carefully attended. He couldn't analyze it, not if he tried — and he'd been begged to try, many times over the decades. He just knew. He wasn't the only hungry person out there. Everyone was hungry for something — food, for sure. But sometimes it was for laughter, sometimes for tears. Sometimes to recognize themselves, sometimes to be jolted into awareness of something novel and even frightening. Hungry for other people, mostly, and radio did that; it brought people together, made them feel less lonely." So cool he gets successful. He's bought out several stations around Philly, called the network  Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.  Bill "got rid of the  Phonographic  right away." Yes,  that  CBS is due to Bill Paley. Uber successful. Can get anything — No, actually not really. He was Jewish, and back then that was a hard-no to get into places. page 96   "But every time a door closed, the slam he heard was a word, and the word was  Jew.  Real or imagined, there it was. Clubs he could never join. Schools his children could never attend. Women he could ever have. Even Babe, once married to him, approached stops with being married to Bill. In her POV on page 117-118 , "She hurt when Bill hurt, that was true. Once, she'd walked over to a new swim club being built across the road from Kiluna North, in lily-white New Hampshire. She thought the children could join; it would do them good to make friends. She introduced herself as Mrs. William S. Paley, filled out the forms, was polite and sincere in her hope that the Paleys could enjoy the club. But she never heard back; later, a neightbor told her it was because Bill — and his children — were Jewish. But that she, Babe, could join if she liked. "She's never told Bill this. She had seen him so wounded, so forlorn, when similar rejections had occured. His blue eyes would fill with tears ad his chin would tremble as if he were a little boy and not one of the most powerful men in all of broadcasting. Then the hurt would drain away to wrath, to steely determination, another house or another Picasso or another television station, or another designerdress that Babe didn't really want but that Bill insisted on, insisted on her looking so unattainable that those who rejected him would surely gnash their teeth in despair, to look at what he owned. Whom he owned." So Bill's self-image is cracked, to say the least. We can empathize with this — to a limit. He still viewed Babe as property and didn't respect her, so I'm not Team Bill today. Especially not when he continues to use Babe. On page 96 . "His "Boston shiksa," with "her society pedigree" could get him "into places he couldn't go alone." Once again, using a woman to climb the ladder. We get a prime comparison of two women, Dorothy Hearst Paley, his first wife, and Babe. Has the gall to be of the belief that his second marriage should be nothing like the first, "a marriage in which the wife taught the husband." Even though he originally "took pains to let others see how much she had taught him." He just changed his mind because page 97 :  "Babe was more astute. She soothed where Dorothy had nagged; she waited where Dorothy would leave impatiently on her own. She anticipated — everything. His hunger, his moods, a tickle in his throat that worried him, and that she couldn't possibly know about but did." Did society train women to  give give give  to men and train men to take take take from women? But no matter how many sandwiches or how many dinners he can sit at in a day, he will always have another hunger. This time, it was page 102   "that friend of Truman's that he's met at another one of these parties, that cute little Carol Marcus, would be there tonight. She was a blonde cream puff, a Marilyn look-alike, lust his type."  He thinks about her naked chest.  "And just like that, Bill Paley was hungry again." Way to Madonna-Whore all women, Bill. And he can't keep it in his pants. If only he had a wife to consummate with, but no, it was a different sort of hunger. Bill was so hungry that he wanted  Truman , Babe's  best friend  to hook him up with a girl. page 140   "You know that little blonde, that Carol something, a friend of yours? I think she's just a terrific little gal. I bet she's a real tiger in bed. I'd like to find out, at any rate. Could you arrange it?" Ugh. Babe knew he was cheating. There was a story of Bill putting sheets in the oven to dry them off because he needed to clean menstruation blood from them. Say you don't know how laundry works without saying you don't know how laundry works. Babe didn't know who, but she know he was stepping out. She wanted to starve him of that opportunity. But she couldn't. Because that was't perfect wife behavior. And she knows this. To Truman, and only to Truman, does Babe air her grievances: page 115 "Because Bill — oh, I was furious with him last night! He didn't even see me, did he? Not once did he compliment me. I had that suit made especially for him, because he once said she liked that color. And he didn't even eat a bite of all that food I arranged just for him! He didn't say a word to Betsey and Jock! He has no idea how hard I work to make things just right for him, to give him what he wants, to look how he wants me to — he just takes it all for granted." Poor Babe. It wasn't until Babe was diagnosed with lung cancer, wasn't until Bill realized how old he was and how much he'd struggle when Babe was gone, that he realized: page 257-258 :  "'I'm such a bastard,' he'd told Truman that afternoon, so eager to find absolution for his sins her spilled them all. 'You don't know how big a bastard I am. I've screwed everyone. Right here in our apartment, in all our beds, in all our homes. I never thought about Babe at all. I wanted what I wanted and I took it. God, one time — one time I was sure she'd find out, because the woman, she left a mess. Blood. You know, that time of the month. And Babe was due home, and it was back when we had that place at the St. Regis, and I couldn't send the laundry out and get it back in time so I scrubbed that stain, scrubbed it like I was Lady Fucking Macbeth. I didn't have any way to dry the sheets, so I baked them in the oven until I could put them on the bed, still wet, and then I fell asleep. And do you know, Babe never once disturbed me? I woke up to find she wasn't even there; she'd come home and found me asleep on the damp sheets, thought I had a fever or something, and left a note saying she'd gone on to Kiluna so she wouldn't bother me. I'm such a bastard. A lousy bastard, and now she's sick, and it's what I deserve. But it's not what she deserves." Babe, sick from the cancer, is finally able to let the facade of perfection go. She's rightfully impatient with Bill's too little to late apologies: page 256   "Babe could put into words feelings and emotions that she'd never been able to before. All the books Truman had made her read — none of that had given her the vocabulary the simple diagnosis of "malignancy" had. 'Let's get you into bed now," Bill said, reaching down to help her out of the chair. 'Leave me alone,' Babe snapped. 'I'm perfectly capable of that.' ...Bill bit his lip, accepted his wife's wrath." Babe later died from her cancer, in the most Babe way: page 314   "She'd died hating him, he knew. Hating him, but loving Truman. But granting him the privilege of a grieving husband; one last time, covering for him, and his sins. Allowing the world to see him as he wanted to be, and not who he was. That was Babe, he thought. Graciously and thoughtfully arranging his life, to the very end." They're both victims of society, but one does the best with the cards they've been dealt and the other gets mad at the dealer. I'll let you decide who is who. 5. Why do you think Truman published La Cote Basque, 1965? What point was he making about (or to) the story’s subjects? Truman "Dan Humphrey'd" himself. Like, he was graced with the close close friendship of New York Society's most influential women, lived the  life , and shot himself in the foot with the belief that he wasn't enough. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy of him not feeling good enough about himself so he never made himself good enough. He drank himself into oblivion. He got good advice rom his partner, Jack: page 277 "'Truman,' Jack has said, aghast, after he'd read the story. "Are you sure about this?' 'What do you mean? Isn't it good?' Truman, reclining on a rubber raft in a pool, dabbled a pudgy red hand in the cool water. He was on his fifth "glass of sunshine" — a tumbler of vodka with a splash of orange juice. 'To be frank, no, it's not. Not your best work my boy.' 'I know someone who's j-e-a-l-o-u-s,' Truman sang, splashing the water after each letter. 'You know that's not true. No, it is. It is true. I've always been jealous.' Jack met Truman's triumphant gaze head-on, not flinching. 'And you know that. You also know that I've never let my jealousy cloud my professional admiration of your work.' Truman pursed his mouth, took another sip of vodka. 'I know,' was all he said. 'But this isn't very good. And that's not even the most disturbing thing. Truman, don't you think they'll all be upset? All your goddamned swans? The Paleys, especially? Won't they be furious?' 'Nah.' Truman closed his eyes again and tilted his face toward the sky, not caring if he got sunburned. 'They're all too stupid. They'll never recognize themselves. Besides, I'm very clever; I did use a few specific names just to throw others off the scent.' 'If you say so," Jack replied. 'But I'd think twice.' 'I don't have to. Anyway, even if they do recognize themselves, what do they expect? They're the ones who told me everything in the first place. Even after In Cold Blood. Even after I told them, the dumb bunnies, that I was writing a book about society.' 'What about Babe?' Truman put his sunglasses on and splashed away on his raft. 'Just think twice, Truman, okay? Promise me you'll do that?' Truman goes on to explain to the reader that he's in a lot of debt and cannot  not  publish this story. He couldn't let Jack or  Esquire  see that he was a failing writer. So he published it and sealed his self-prophesied fate. I think he was trying to make a move to reach higher status than the ladies. Surely, after all this time, decades after his passing, we're still talking about him, so yeah, perhaps he was the one to make them all infamous. He got what he wanted: page 41   "But it wasn't enough, and late that night, as Truman turned away from a softly snoring Jack, there was a dancing flame inside of him that could not be extinguished, could never be extinguished no matter how many sleeping pills he took. No matter how many times he told himself that it could be lit again by the morning sun. But there was always  more. " More beauty to be seen, more places to travel, more acclaim to be won. More love to earn, to barter, to exchange or withhold. To miss, always." Outside, looking in. Why did he always feel that way, every moment of every day? ...Leaving him behind. He was always left behind. So he had to try harder. Be more. ...If only he had the best stories, dished the most delicious gossip, dropped the grandest of names. Then, perhaps. Then. Would he truly belong?" I think he wrote the story to remind the Swans that they too were human. When the story is finally published in the book, I start to notice more acknowledgement of age and aging out of eras. When the story comes out, the ladies are in their later prime years. None of them fully recovered to their hay day because it was all too late. He stole their grand exit out of society and wanted to stay besties. I don't know why he thought he could call them up right after and just chat like old times. He betrayed them! I think it speaks to how Truman was betrayed by his mother but he always loved her. The trauma cycle continued and he took down The Swans. 6. Truman and Babe were both heavily influenced by their mothers. In what ways were their childhood experiences similar? In what ways were they different? Truman's mother, Nina, or Lillie Mae, because Truman was a pathological liar, wanted nothing to do with Truman. She locked him away, left him with sketchy family, ignored him. page 13 : Truman says,  "'My mother hated me. Hated me! Despised, loathed.' ... 'She abandoned me to those horrible cousins in Monroeville, and I thought I'd never see her again. She used to lock me in hotel rooms, did you know? Lock me in while she went off with her 'gentleman callers' ... I'd cry and cry but she left instructions, you see. Told the staff not to let me out no matter how I hollered. And I did! But then I'd finally tire myself out and fall asleep, never knowing when — if — she'd come back for me.' ...I could have written the Bible, and she'd still call me, to my face, the greatest disappointment of her life." So I'm feeling sad for this guy, and he finishes the sad tale with "'Well,' — and Truman did grin up at [Babe], a sly, satisfied little boyish grin. "I will admit to overcoming my childhood, anyway." Like for one: at this point I'm 14 pages into this story and learned that he's capable of lying to spin a tale that would induce empathy from others. He's got a "sly, satisfied boyish grin" after trauma dumping onto a  new  friend? Questionable authenticity here. And two: Truman Capote's childhood trauma is sewn into every story he weaves together. He has  not  overcome it, he's not behind it or even on top of it. He's six feet under and drowning. Childhood trauma is a real big hurdle. It's not to be made light out of. If you or somebody you know is struggling with the lasting effects of their own experiences, always, always, always know that there are organizations and good humans out there that want to help. Do your best to not be a hurt human that hurts humans. Truman was hurrrrrrrrrrrt. He kept the cycle going. Babe inherited some BS from her mother, Gogs. The sisters called her Gogs. What could that possibly be a nickname for? I looked up her government name and, according to Wikipedia, it's Katharine Stone. ... I wonder what leaps were taken to get to "Gogs." According to Merriam-Webster, gogs means that of "stir," "excitement," or "eagerness.":  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gog Similar to agog and its "full of intense interest or excitement; eager"?  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agog Everybody was going by a different name back then. Babe's name was Barbara, Lucy Douglas Cochrane was called C.Z. because "her idiot brother couldn't pronounce  Sissy." Not even just in the book. A little chat with my AI tells me "Yes, using nicknames and monikers was indeed popular among high society in New York, particularly in the early to mid-20th century. This tradition added an air of exclusivity, intimacy, and a touch of glamour to their identities. Here are a few points on why and how nicknames were used: Intimacy and Familiarity : Within elite circles, nicknames created a sense of closeness and personal connection. It signified that one was part of the inner circle, familiar with the informal and private aspects of each other's lives. Glamour and Identity : Nicknames often reflected the personality or public image of the individual. They could enhance a person's mystique or charisma, making them memorable in social settings. Social Code : Using nicknames was part of the social code of the time. It set apart those who were 'in the know' from those who were not, reinforcing social hierarchies and networks. Media and Public Perception : The press also popularized these nicknames, making society figures more accessible to the public while maintaining a degree of separation. This was particularly prevalent with socialites who were frequently in the public eye." So of course  Gogs  made sure that her daughter Barbara was known as  Babe. Babe's mother, Gogs, wanted EVERYTHING to do with Babe. Gogs orchestrated EVERYTHING for her daughter's life. I imagine Babe would have happily stayed a career woman at  Vogue  had her mother not insisted upon marriage. On page 19 , Babe tells Truman:  "'I was raised to marry well,' Babe finally said, with a simple, elegant shrug. 'My mother was a force of nature, although not like yours. She would never have abandoned us. We were her life's work." On page 20 , we get our Gogs lore questions answered when Babe says,   "'Gogs. That's what we called her, after our own children were born." Babe, even though the reader later finds out how poorly Gogs treated her, she doesn't say anything terrible about her mother. She's still beauty and grace and perfection. Everything her mother bred and raised her to be. Ugh. But she broke the cycle! Kind of. On page 167 , she states,  "She didn't like children very much, she had to admit; her arms simply didn't ache to hold her babies; she wasn't tolerant of the odors and stains of childhood. And as the children grew, each with their special problems — Amanda terribly shy; Bill Junior hyper, afraid of his father; poor Kate so permanently stresses she'd lost her hair as a child ... Babe found herself letting each letting them down, incapable of fixing them, molding them, as her mother had molded her. So she withdrew from her own children, and hoped others could do it for her. Babe did the best for them that she could...at an arms length. She made sure they went to the best schools and got the best toys and were cared for by the best governesses that she compensated  very  well. She admits to herself that her children will remember her as a ghost in their lives. Like she's always around but only in the peripherals. So, a new sort of trauma, but she's not doing what her mother did...so... 9. Do you think Babe forgave Truman, in the end? Honestly, it's in her nature. On page 310 :  "I think part of the whole thing was that he was testing us, testing us to make sure we loved him. Really loved him. Because true love means forgiving, no matter what. And we failed him. We didn't love him that way." That is trauma talking. He betrayed Babe and all she can think of is how she may have hurt Truman. She had to be so dejected with the story, with the realization that she opened herself up to be extremely vulnerable with them, and her secrets had been  published to the general public — of the nation  in a story written by Truman. I think, especially with the cancer, this would have been another blow that she was trained to endure and had become numb to. She had to be perfect no matter how many people disrespected her. Truman had just made the list and she died wanting him — still wanting the entity that allowed her to be herself. If she denied Truman, then she denied the parts about herself that she loved when she was with him. Tragic. 12. Who surprised you the most? Why? On page 6 , Slim is talking to Babe and claims, "I introduced you to him first...You just don't remember. But he was mine, my True Heart. It's not fair that you've stolen him from me." Gloria claims to have been the one to discover him and then Pamela does and then C.Z. and then Marella,  but  let's, just for a moment: Imagine if Truman had latched onto Slim Keith instead of Babe Paley. I think, after  La Côte Basque, 1965  was published, Slim would have cut Truman's throat and splayed him out across 5th Avenue. I think that Slim would have been Babe if Babe had kept on being Odeal, her imagined personality of an orphan, admired by all for her pluck and wit. When I found out that Slim and Bill were a thing, my jaw dropped. Slim played the game. And of  course  she's Lady Ina Coolbirth in  La Côte Basque, 1965.  Lady Keith? Come on. FINAL THOUGHTS This novel read to me like a cautionary tale. If you're going to want an opulent and wealthy lifestyle, there are sacrifices one needs to make. If you're a woman, this book will showcase realities of marriage that are, honestly, still going on today. I found myself reading certain excerpts and having to pause afterwards. page 312 :  "Babe woke up one morning knowing that she wouldn't wake up again; it had been too much effort to swim up from the darkness, and she didn't welcome consciousness and one more glimpse of the sun; one more day lying like a specimen, her family hovering over her, counting every single breath she managed to take. So she gestured to a nurse, who understood; the nurse brought her a tray filled with her cosmetics, a small mirror on a stand, and Babe Paley did her makeup one last time, with the same calming sense of ritual she's always had when she looked in a mirror, starting first with the foundation, applied with a sponge, so shakily now — the sponge weight like a heavy stone in her translucent  fingers although she couldn't really feel it, as her extremities were cold and numb. But she didn't flinch from the mirror, from the ravaged remnants of a person staring back; she knew she could conceal the damage, the flaws, and emerge beautiful, the butterfly from the chrysalis, one last time. She had to pause and take long gasps from the oxygen mask; she had to rest between applications, between the foundation and then the blush and then the concealer, and then the eyeshadow, the intricately applied layers, and then the liner, which, with a grim determination, a gritting of her teeth, she managed to quiet her shaking hands long enough to apply flawlessly, the line straight and smooth, and she lay the liner brush down with a sigh, and felt as if she'd won a battle, the last battle. Now she was ready." Big sigh. I've been privileged with health and haven't had to think about the work of waking up or even what my last day would be like. For this excerpt, I felt for Babe. I felt as calm as she was in her last day. It was a beautiful snippet of life. Historical fiction is a favorite genre of mine because, even if this book is fictionalized, the basis still came from real-life history. Sometimes history is wilder than fiction. Humans are wild — wealthy humans are feral. Outro Thank you for checking out my opinion on some, but not all, discussion questions on  The Swans of Fifth Avenue  by Melanie Benjamin. It was a joy to finally read this book as it had been on my to-be-read shelf for years. Let me know what you think of the novel in the comments. I'll also link Melanie Benjamin's website so you can see the entire list of Questions and Topics for Discussion. One of which, I'll pose to you: Can you think of a woman who is the modern equivalent of Babe Paley and her circle of friends? Author Website:  https://melaniebenjamin.com/ Novel Page:  https://melaniebenjamin.com/swans-of-fifth-avenue/ Reading Guide:  https://melaniebenjamin.com/pdfs/swans-of-fifth-avenue-book-guide.pdf Anyway, be kind to other humans and visit your local library! Katherine Arkady

Book Information What is the title of the book? Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief Who is the author of the book? Rick Riordan When was the book published? March 1, 2006 by Disney Hyperion Books What genre does the book belong to? Fantasy, Young Adult, Mythology, Fiction, Middle Grade, Adventure, Greek Mythology Are there any notable awards or recognitions the book has received? Young Readers' Choice Award (2008) Books I Loved Best Yearly (BILBY) Awards for Older Readers (2011) South Carolina Book Award for Junior Book Award (2008) Grand Canyon Reader Award for Tween Book (2008) Nene Award (2008) Massachusetts Children's Book Award (2008) Pennsylvania Young Readers' Choice Award for Grades 6-8 (2008) Rhode Island Teen Book AwardNominee (2007) Sunshine State Young Readers Award for Grades 6-8 (2007) Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader's Choice Award for Intermediate (2008) Iowa Teen Award (2009) Lincoln Award Nominee (2009) Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award for YA (2008) Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award (2009) Maud Hart Lovelace Award for Grades 6–8 (2009) Who are the main characters (for fiction) or key figures (for non-fiction)? 1. Perseus "Percy" Jackson Role: The protagonist of the story, a 12-year-old demigod and son of Poseidon. Personality: Brave, loyal, and sarcastic with a strong sense of justice. Though he struggles with ADHD and dyslexia, these traits are later revealed to be signs of his demigod heritage. 2. Annabeth Chase Role: Daughter of Athena and one of Percy’s close friends and allies. Personality: Smart, resourceful, and confident with a strong desire to prove herself. She has been at Camp Half-Blood since she was seven years old. 3. Grover Underwood Role: Percy’s best friend, protector, and a satyr (half-human, half-goat). Personality: Loyal, kind-hearted, and often anxious. He shows bravery when it counts. 4. Luke Castellan Role: A son of Hermes and one of the older campers at Camp Half-Blood. Personality: Charismatic, skilled in sword-fighting, and  initially  seems like a friendly mentor to Percy. 5. Chiron Role: The activities director at Camp Half-Blood and a centaur (half-human, half-horse). Personality: Wise, patient, and kind. He's a mentor to Percy and the other campers. 6. Sally Jackson Role: Percy’s  mother. Personality: Caring and protective, she goes to great lengths to keep Percy safe. Discussion Questions 7. The god Ares says he loves America. He calls it “the best place since Sparta.” What does he mean? Do you agree with his assessment of America? Why? Why not? This context exists on   page 277 . The whole quote is as follows:      "“You can’t do that,” I told Ares. “You can’t just threaten people with a knife.”     Ares laughed. “Are you kidding? I love this country. Best place since Sparta. Don’t you carry a weapon, punk? You should. Dangerous world out there. Which brings me to my proposition. I need you to do me a favor.” According to the   World History Encyclopedia , "Sparta  was one of the most important city -states in ancient  Greece  and was famous for its military prowess. The professional and well-trained Spartan hoplites with their distinctive red cloaks and long hair were probably the best and most feared fighters in Greece." So of course Ares would love America. It's a country with a huge military prowess, a country that's big on patriotism, and a country that is at some unrest. Of course, this is me reading  the 2006 copy in 2024, but, clearly, things have stayed pretty much the same. I think a lot of eyes are on America and Ares, the greek god of war, enjoys this environment. I think a lot of Americans enjoy this environment. Why else would we have our eyes glued to the news while they give us doom and gloom? The news is even touched upon in the novel. When Percy goes "missing," Smelly Gabe takes advantage of this moment to get exposure. Now, there's no way that Rick Riordan could have known in 2006 how much exposure would pay in this day in age, but, based on the passage below, there was always a spark of it waiting to arise. From   pages 274 :      "I froze in front of an appliance-store window because a television was playing an interview with somebody who looked very familiar—my stepdad, Smelly Gabe. He was talking to Barbara Walters—I mean, as if he were some kind of huge celebrity. She was interviewing him in our apartment, in the middle of a poker game, and there was a young blond lady sitting next to him, patting his hand.     A fake tear glistened on his cheek. He was saying, “Honest, Ms. Walters, if it wasn’t for Sugar here, my grief counselor, I’d be a wreck. My stepson took everything I cared about. My wife ... my Camaro ... I—I’m sorry. I have trouble talking about it.”     “There you have it, America.” Barbara Walters turned to the camera. “A man torn apart. An adolescent boy with serious issues. Let me show you, again, the last known photo of this troubled young fugitive, taken a week ago in Denver.” I mean, if anybody didn't have an opinion on Percy, Barbara Walters, in this fashion, told America how to feel about him. Furthermore, they put questions in the public's head. Continuing on   page 274 :       “Who are the other children in this photo?” Barbara Walters asked dramatically. “Who is the man with them? Is Percy Jackson a delinquent, a terrorist, or perhaps the brainwashed victim of a frightening new cult? When we come back, we chat with a leading child psychologist. Stay tuned, America.” So they make a story up, feed it to the public, and create hysteria. Kind of like the things needed for war. Okay, okay, okay. No wonder Ares loves America. On   page 275 , while in this same thought process, Percy thinks:     "I’m a New Yorker. I don’t scare easy. But L.A. had a totally different feel from New York. Back home, everything seemed close. It didn’t matter how big the city was, you could get anywhere without getting lost. The street pattern and the subway made sense. There was a system to how things worked. A kid could be safe as long as he wasn’t stupid.     L.A. wasn’t like that. It was spread out, chaotic, hard to move around. It reminded me of Ares. It wasn’t enough for L.A. to be big; it had to prove it was big by being loud and strange and difficult to navigate, too." So the mindset of the people, the chaotic layout of the land, and the noise that it all had to make. No wonder Ares loves America. 8. At the Lotus Casino, Percy realizes that unless he gets out quickly, he will “…stay here, happy forever, playing games forever, and soon I’d forget my mom, and my quest, and maybe my own name. I’d be playing Virtual Rifleman with groovy Disco Darrin forever.” What critique is the author offering of modern life? Do you agree with it? I think modern life has become very very,   very  difficult to navigate. A lot of escapism is necessary to handle it. I know after a long day, I need a cozy game to play or a comfort show to watch (maybe with a j). Other folk handle this stress in other ways with substances, shopping, poor eating habits, scrolling in social media, etc etc. Percy is going through it, so I don't blame him for considering the choice of staying at the Lotus Casino "happy forever." A lot of folk did. Even the kid that had been there since 1977. That is an extreme sort of escapism, but it begs a deeper question: Are we better off in this day in age? Dionysus, when talking with Percy on   page 68 , brings up a good point:     “But they’re stories,” I said. “They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.”     “Science!” Mr. D scoffed. “And tell me, Perseus Jackson”—I flinched when he said my real name, which I never told anybody—”what will people think of your ‘science’ two thousand years from now?” Mr. D continued. “Hmm? They will call it primitive mumbo jumbo. That’s what. Oh, I love mortals—they have absolutely no sense of perspective. They think they’ve come so-o-o far." Have we come so-o-o far? Riordan sprinkled in a lot regarding the differences of Ancient Greece and Modern America. For instance, humans are a lot more distrated. On   page 198 :     " The rest of the day I spent alternately pacing the length of the train (because I had a really hard time sitting still) or looking out the windows.     Once, I spotted a family of centaurs galloping across a wheat field, bows at the ready, as they hunted lunch. The little boy centaur, who was the size of a second- grader on a pony, caught my eye and waved. I looked around the passenger car, but nobody else had noticed. The adult riders all had their faces buried in laptop computers or magazines." I don't have to explain our screen addiction.   You know. And where is all this pleasure and escapism getting us? Struggling? Inept? Polluted? Grover was my favorite character, especially because he had the most to say about the environment. On   pg 189:     He nodded, but still didn’t close his eyes. “It makes me sad, Percy.”     “What does? The fact that you signed up for this stupid quest?”     “No. This makes me sad.” He pointed at all the garbage on the ground. “And the sky. You can’t even see the stars. They’ve polluted the sky. This is a terrible time to be a satyr.”     “Oh, yeah. I guess you’d be an environmentalist.”     He glared at me. “Only a human wouldn’t be. Your species is clogging up the world so fast ... ah, never mind. It’s useless to lecture a human. At the rate things are going, I’ll never find Pan.” In this rendition of Pan, Grover explains that   "'The God of Wild Places' disappeared two thousand years ago...When humans heard the news, they believed it. They've been pillaging Pan's kingdom ever since. But for the satyrs, Pan was our lord and master. He protected us and the wild places of the earth. We refuse to believe that he died. In every generation, the bravest satyrs pledge their lives to finding Pan. They search the earth, exploring all the wildest places, hoping to find where he is hidden, and wake him from his sleep." In this modern world, we exploit the earth's resources. We are pillaging Pan's Kingdom. And that's super unhealthy because we humans are of the earth. So we are exploiting ourselves. We can choose to ignore this but, nearly 20 years after the 2006 copy, this rings truer than ever. Climate change is wreaking havoc, there's a huge mass of garbage floating in the ocean, and we are...doom scrolling? I think Riordan does a good job of opening this topic up for discussion at an age appropriate level. On   page 212 , Percy observes:     "But my impact with the water hadn’t hurt. I was falling slowly now, bubbles trickling up through my fingers. I settled on the river bottom soundlessly. A catfish the size of my stepfather lurched away into the gloom. Clouds of silt and disgusting garbage—beer bottles, old shoes, plastic bags—swirled up all around me."     Or with this quote on page 311 :     "Debris fell from the cavern ceiling. Doors burst open all along the walls, and skeletal warriors marched in, hundreds of them, from every time period and nation in Western civilization. They lined the perimeter of the room, blocking the exits.     Hades bellowed, “Do you think I want war, godling?”     I wanted to say, Well, these guys don’t look like peace activists. But I thought that might be a dangerous answer.     “You are the Lord of the Dead,” I said carefully. “A war would expand your kingdom, right?”     “A typical thing for my brothers to say! Do you think I need more subjects? Did you not see the sprawl of the Asphodel Fields?”     “Well...”     “Have you any idea how much my kingdom has swollen in this past century alone, how many subdivisions I’ve had to open?” In this last century, following the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, we have begun killing ourselves in worse ways than before.     The whole thing is cinched up pretty well for me with the following passage on   page 289 :     "When I blinked again, the elevator wasn’t an elevator anymore. We were standing in a wooden barge. Charon was poling us across a dark, oily river, swirling with bones, dead fish, and other, stranger things—plastic dolls, crushed carnations, soggy diplomas with gilt edges. “The River Styx,” Annabeth murmured. “It’s so ...”     “Polluted,” Charon said. “For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across—hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.'” I think modern day has become irresponsible. I think haste makes waste. I think humans need to get with it and focus more on what should matter: a healthy planet, a healthy community, and a healthy mindset away from unhealthy distractions. Here are some other quotes to consider for this question: pg 65-66     “You do know how to play pinochle?” Mr. D eyed me suspiciously.     “I’m afraid not,” I said.     “I’m afraid not, sir,” he said.     “Sir,” I repeated. I was liking the camp director less and less.     “Well,” he told me, “it is, along with gladiator fighting and Pac-Man, one of the greatest games ever invented by humans. I would expect all civilized young men to know the rules.”     “I’m sure the boy can learn,” Chiron said. pg 72-73     “Mount Olympus,” I said. “You’re telling me there really is a palace there?”     “Well now, there’s Mount Olympus in Greece. And then there’s the home of the gods, the convergence point of their powers, which did indeed used to be on Mount Olympus. It’s still called Mount Olympus, out of respect to the old ways, but the palace moves, Percy, just as the gods do.”     “You mean the Greek gods are here? Like ... in America?”     “Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.”     “The what?”     “Come now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, as you well know—or as I hope you know, since you passed my course—the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. Oh, different names, perhaps—Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite, and so on—but the same forces, the same gods.”     “And then they died.”     “Died? No. Did the West die? The gods simply moved, to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England. All you need to do is look at the architecture. People do not forget the gods. Every place they’ve ruled, for the last three thousand years, you can see them in paintings, in statues, on the most important buildings. And yes, Percy, of course they are now in your United States. Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek facades of your government buildings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not prominently displayed in multiple places. Like it or not—and believe me, plenty of people weren’t very fond of Rome, either—America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here. And we are here.” pg 247     On the other hand, I had no idea what to expect next. The gods kept toying with me. At least Hephaestus had the decency to be honest about it—he’d put up cameras and advertised me as entertainment. But even when the cameras weren’t rolling, I had a feeling my quest was being watched. I was a source of amusement for the gods. pg 259-260     We took the elevator upstairs and checked out our room. It was a suite with three separate bedrooms and a bar stocked with candy, sodas, and chips. A hotline to room service. Fluffy towels and water beds with feather pillows. A big-screen television with satellite and high-speed Internet. The balcony had its own hot tub, and sure enough, there was a skeet-shooting machine and a shotgun, so you could launch clay pigeons right out over the Las Vegas skyline and plug them with your gun. I didn’t see how that could be legal, but I thought it was pretty cool. The view over the Strip and the desert was amazing, though I doubted we’d ever find time to look at the view with a room like this.     “Oh, goodness,” Annabeth said. “This place is ...”     “Sweet,” Grover said. “Absolutely sweet.” pg 263     We went searching, and found him still playing Virtual Deer Hunter.     “Grover!” we both shouted.     He said, “Die, human! Die, silly polluting nasty person!”     “Grover!”     He turned the plastic gun on me and started clicking, as if I were just another image from the screen. pg 270     “Percy?” Annabeth said. “What are you doing?”     I kept walking, up to my waist, then my chest.     She called after me, “You know how polluted that water is? There’re all kinds of toxic—”    That’s when my head went under. pg 285-286     “We want to go the Underworld,” she said.     Charon’s mouth twitched. “Well, that’s refreshing.”     “It is?” she asked.     “Straightforward and honest. No screaming. No ‘There must be a mistake, Mr. Charon.’“ He looked us over. “How did you die, then?”     I nudged Grover.     “Oh,” he said. “Um ... drowned ... in the bathtub.”     “All three of you?” Charon asked. We nodded.     “Big bathtub.” Charon looked mildly impressed. “ I don’t suppose you have coins for passage.     Normally, with adults, you see, I could charge your American Express, or add the ferry price to your last cable bill. But with children ... alas, you never die prepared. Suppose you’ll have to take a seat for a few centuries.”     “Oh, but we have coins.” I set three golden drachmas on the counter, part of the stash I’d found in Crusty’s office desk. pg 307     Whatever was in that pit was nobody’s pet. It was unspeakably old and powerful. Even Echidna hadn’t given me that feeling. I was almost relieved to turn my back on that tunnel and head toward the palace of Hades.     Almost.     The Furies circled the parapets, high in the gloom. The outer walls of the fortress glittered black, and the two-story-tall bronze gates stood wide open.     Up close, I saw that the engravings on the gates were scenes of death. Some were from modern times—an atomic bomb exploding over a city, a trench filled with gas mask-wearing soldiers, a line of African famine victims waiting with empty bowls—but all of them looked as if they’d been etched into the bronze thousands of years ago. I wondered if I was looking at prophecies that had come true. pg 308     Every side doorway was guarded by a skeleton in military gear. Some wore Greek armor, some British redcoat uniforms, some camouflage with tattered American flags on the shoulders. They carried spears or muskets or M-16s. None of them bothered us, but their hollow eye sockets followed us as we walked down the hall, toward the big set of doors at the opposite end.     Two U.S. Marine skeletons guarded the doors. They grinned down at us, rocket-propelled grenade launchers held across their chests.     “You know,” Grover mumbled, “I bet Hades doesn’t have trouble with door-to-door salesmen.” pg 364     “I’ve lived at Half-Blood Hill year-round since I was fourteen,” he told me. “Ever since Thalia ... well, you know. I trained, and trained, and trained. I never got to be a normal teenager, out there in the real world. Then they threw me one quest, and when I came back, it was like, ‘Okay, ride’s over. Have a nice life.’“     He crumpled his Coke can and threw into the creek, which really shocked me. One of the first things you learn at Camp Half-Blood is: Don’t litter. You’ll hear from the nymphs and the naiads.They’ll get even. You’ll crawl into bed one night and find your sheets filled with centipedes and mud.     “The heck with laurel wreaths,” Luke said. “I’m not going to end up like those dusty trophies in the Big House attic." 9. When describing the effects of Mist, Chiron says, “Remarkable, really, the lengths humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.” How is this true in the novel? In Greek mythology?     My thoughts on Question 8 segue pretty well into this question. The human mind is complex. The human mind struggles to wrap its head around modern day. The human mind struggles to wrap its head around life itself! I don't blame humans for confusion, doubt, and questions about what it all means. What I do blame humans for is their, what seems like, lack of concern for the truth. They find a concept or idea that they're comfy with and they stick with it. Sometimes, they even double down on it. I'm guilty of doing that, though it's always my goal to learn and change my mindset based on new facts that come through. But not all humans do this. The above prompt stems from   page 154-155 : “Okay, that’s extremely cool,” I admitted. “But what if a mortal sees me pulling out a sword?”     Chiron smiled. “Mist is a powerful thing, Percy.”     “Mist?”     “Yes. Read The Iliad. It’s full of references to the stuff. Whenever divine or monstrous elements mix with the mortal world, they generate Mist, which obscures the vision of humans. You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality." It really is remarkable. Furthermore, the book comments on how a general population of humans choose to live their life. It's well put in the passage on   pg 292-293     “There’s a court for dead people?”     “Yeah. Three judges. They switch around who sits on the bench. King Minos, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare—people like that. Sometimes they look at a life and decide that person needs a special reward—the Fields of Elysium. Sometimes they decide on punishment. But most people, well, they just lived. Nothing special, good or bad. So they go to the Asphodel Fields.”     “And do what?”     Grover said, “Imagine standing in a wheat field in Kansas. Forever.”     “Harsh,” I said.     “Not as harsh as that,” Grover muttered. “Look.”     A couple of black-robbed ghouls had pulled aside one spirit and were frisking him at the security desk. The face of the dead man looked vaguely familiar.     “He’s that preacher who made the news, remember?” Grover asked.     “Oh, yeah.” I did remember now. We’d seen him on TV a couple of times at the Yancy Academy dorm. He was this annoying televangelist from upstate New York who’d raised millions of dollars for orphanages and then got caught spending the money on stuff for his mansion, like gold-plated toilet seats, and an indoor putt- putt golf course. He’d died in a police chase when his “Lamborghini for the Lord” went off a cliff.     I said, “What’re they doing to him?”     “Special punishment from Hades,” Grover guessed. “The really bad people get his personal attention as soon as they arrive. The Fur—the Kindly Ones will set up an eternal torture for him.”     The thought of the Furies made me shudder. I realized I was in their home territory now. Old Mrs. Dodds would be licking her lips with anticipation.     “But if he’s a preacher,” I said, “and he believes in a different hell... .”     Grover shrugged. “Who says he’s seeing this place the way we’re seeing it? Humans see what they want to see. You’re very stubborn—er, persistent, that way.” Humans see what they want to see. Humans do what they want to do. There's a saying about "to control a cat is to control chaos." I think humans could use this thought about their minds. To control their mind is to control chaos. We, after all, can only completely control ourselves and our outlook. But, as Percy observes on   page 302 : "But I thought of how few people there were in Elysium, how tiny it was compared to the Fields of Asphodel or even the Fields of Punishment. So few people did good in their lives. It was depressing." I'd like to think that humans won't let the mist befall their eyes. I'd like to think that humans will wake up to what they've allowed for too long. I'd also bet money that humans will continue being humans and that means seeing what they want to see — or what their algorithm is telling them to see. Get off your phones, folks. Here are some other quotes to consider for this question: pg 45-46     “So you admit there was a Mrs. Dodds!” “Of course.” “Then why—”     “The less you knew, the fewer monsters you’d attract,” Grover said, like that should be perfectly obvious. “We put Mist over the humans’ eyes. We hoped you’d think the Kindly One was a hallucination. But it was no good. You started to realize who you are.”     “Who I—wait a minute, what do you mean?”     The weird bellowing noise rose up again somewhere behind us, closer than before. Whatever was chasing us was still on our trail.     “Percy,” my mom said, “there’s too much to explain and not enough time. We have to get you to safety.” pg 154-155     “You can’t,” Chiron said.     “Can’t what?”     “Lose the pen,” he said. “It is enchanted. It will always reappear in your pocket. Try it.”     I was wary, but I threw the pen as far as I could down the hill and watched it disappear in the grass.     “It may take a few moments,” Chiron told me. “Now check your pocket.” Sure enough, the pen was there.     “Okay, that’s extremely cool,” I admitted. “But what if a mortal sees me pulling out a sword?”     Chiron smiled. “Mist is a powerful thing, Percy.”     “Mist?”     “Yes. Read The Iliad. It’s full of references to the stuff. Whenever divine or monstrous elements mix with the mortal world, they generate Mist, which obscures the vision of humans. You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality." pg 162     “A back exit?” she suggested.     There wasn’t one. Even if there had been, it wouldn’t have helped. By that time, we were on Ninth Avenue, heading for the Lincoln Tunnel.     “They won’t attack us with witnesses around,” I said. “Will they?”     “Mortals don’t have good eyes,” Annabeth reminded me. “Their brains can only process what they see through the Mist.”     “They’ll see three old ladies killing us, won’t they?”     She thought about it. “Hard to say. But we can’t count on mortals for help. Maybe an emergency exit in the roof ... ?” pg 302     In the middle of that valley was a glittering blue lake, with three small islands like a vacation resort in the Bahamas. The Isles of the Blest, for people who had chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium. Immediately I knew that’s where I wanted to go when I died.     “That’s what it’s all about,” Annabeth said, like she was reading my thoughts. “That’s the place for heroes.”     But I thought of how few people there were in Elysium, how tiny it was compared to the Fields of Asphodel or even the Fields of Punishment. So few people did good in their lives. It was depressing. pg 325-326     He swung the baseball bat off his shoulder. “How would you like to get smashed: classic or modern?”     I showed him my sword.     “That’s cool, dead boy,” he said. “Classic it is.” The baseball bat changed into a huge, two-handed sword. The hilt was a large silver skull with a ruby in its mouth. pg 334-335     It’s funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that long ago. As usual, I didn’t appreciate his wisdom until much later.     According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake.     This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror.     Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—”Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.     The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (which wasn’t hard), and played victimized kids for the cameras.     “All I want,” I said, choking back my tears, “is to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew ... somehow ... we would be okay. And I know he’ll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here’s the phone number.” The police and reporters were so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for three tickets on the next plane to New York. 12. Throughout the story, Percy is troubled by frightening dreams. In what ways do those dreams increase the tension in the story? Is their menace completely resolved by the end of the story? As somebody who has "movie quality" dreams. Percy's dreams were pretty well placed. The first dream is on   page 41 . This introduction of dreams start off innocent enough, like Percy's being bothered about the current situation and his brain needed to process it. This is like any other dream. When reading about the white horse and the golden eagle lighting, I knew the author had to have a purpose in bringing it up. At this stage, even with mention of "a monstrous voice chuckled somewhere beneath the earth, goading the animals to fight harder," I didn't think too much of it. Then, on pages   pg 129-131,  Percy dreams again:       "I was running along the beach in a storm. This time, there was a city behind me. Not New York. The sprawl was different: buildings spread farther apart, palm trees and low hills in the distance.     About a hundred yards down the surf, two men were fighting. They looked like TV wrestlers, muscular, with beards and long hair. Both wore flowing Greek tunics, one trimmed in blue, the other in green. They grappled with each other, wrestled, kicked and head-butted, and every time they connected, lightning flashed, the sky grew darker, and the wind rose." So at this point, I connect the dots that the white horse from the first dream is likely Poseidon in the blue, who is also God of Horses, and the golden eagle was Zeus, now in the green. They're fighting and Percy "feels" that he needs to stop it. This is a calling coming to him via dreams. As a reader, this is tight. As a writer, I'm taking notes. As Percy, I would feel real uneasy at the following,      "Laughter came from somewhere under the earth, and a voice so deep and evil it turned my blood to ice .     Come down, little hero, the voice crooned. Come down!" So I'm brought to assume this is Hades, right? God of the Underworld, brother to Zeus and Poseidon. But then, with this dream on   pages 193-194 : "In my dreams, I stood in a dark cavern before a gaping pit. Gray mist creatures churned all around me, whispering rags of smoke that I somehow knew were the spirits of the dead.     They tugged at my clothes, trying to pull me back, but I felt compelled to walk forward to the very edge of the chasm.     Looking down made me dizzy.     The pit yawned so wide and was so completely black, I knew it must be bottomless. Yet I had a feeling that something was trying to rise from the abyss, something huge and evil.     The little hero, an amused voice echoed far down in the darkness. Too weak, too young, but perhaps you will do.     The voice felt ancient — cold and heavy. It wrapped around me like sheets of lead.     They have misled you, boy, it said. Barter with me. I will give you what you want.     A shimmering image hovered over the void: my mother, frozen at the moment she'd dissolved in a shower of gold. Her face was distorted with pain, as if the Minotaur were still squeezing her neck. Her eyes looked directly at me, pleading: Go!     I tried to cry out, but my voice wouldn't work. Cold laughter echoed from the chasm.     An invisible force pulled me forward. It would drag me into the pit unless I stood firm.     Help me rise, boy. The voice became hungrier. Bring me the bolt. Strike a blow against the treacherous gods!"     So I'm no longer thinking that this is Hades. This dream was pivotal in adding the right tension. Something ancient, more ancient than Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon. The heebiest of jeebies got to me here. And then, on   pages 252-254,     "Percy Jackson, it said. Yes, the exchange went well, I see.     I was back in the dark cavern, spirits of the dead drifting around me. Unseen in the pit, the monstrous thing was speaking, but this time it wasn't addressing me. The numbing power of its voice seemed directed somewhere else.     And he suspects nothing? it asked.     Another voice, one I almost recognized, answered at my shoulder. Nothing, my lord. He is as ignorant as the rest.     I looked over, but no one was there. The speaker was invisible.     Deception upon deception, the thing in the pit mused aloud. Excellent.    Truly, my lord, said the voice next to me, you are well-named the Crooked One. But was it really necessary? I could have brought you what I stole directly —    You? the monster said in scorn. You have already shown your limits. You would have failed me completely had I not intervened.     But, my lord —     Peace, little servant. Our six months have bought us much. Zeus's anger has grown. Poseidon has played his most desperate card. Now we shall use it against him. Shortly you shall have the reward you wish, and your revenge. As soon as both items are delivered into my hands ... but wait. He is here.     What? The invisible servant suddenly sounded tense. You summoned him, my lord?     No. The full force of the monsters attention was now pouring over me, freezing me in place. Blast his father's blood — he is too changeable, too unpredictable. The boy brought himself hither.     Impossible! the servant cried.     For a weakling such as you, perhaps, the voice snarled. Then its cold power turned back on me. So ... you wish to dream of your quest, young half-blood? Then I will oblige."     WHO IS THIS TRAITOR? This is the person the oracle was talking about. HAD TO BE. The author did very well with sprinkling in the right amount of information. Even while Percy was awake, the dreams added tension. From Annabeth especially. On   page 267 : "Annabeth was looking at me as if she knew my next question, and was silently willing me not to ask it.     "You have an idea what might be in that pit, don't you?" I asked her. "I mean, if it isn't Hades?"     "Percy...let's not talk about it. Because if it isn't Hades...No. It has to be Hades." And then they finally get to the pit on   page 303 , I felt like I had already been there because of the dreams. A great storytelling tool. This is where things came to a head in discovering what was going on down below. The menace is not solved by the end of this book, but boy, does it get a reader excited for the second book and the following. Well met! ACTIVITIES A3. World War II is revealed in the book to actually have been triggered by an epic battle between the gods. How can a modern event be explained by the gods? Pick a current event—an earthquake, a battle, or even a surprising celebrity love affair—and explain how the gods were really behind it. You can present your explanations as a television newscast! Voice Over: Breaking News from OlympusTV Helene Parthenos : Good evening, Olympus! I'm Helene Parthenos. We have a special report for you this evening regarding new papers that have been released from their confidential bindings. You all remember Studio 54 of New York divinely, any god worth their weight in drachmas visited. The mortals partied under disco balls and strobe lights, but this story is about the chaotic Olympians pulling strings behind the scenes. Buckle up, because this story is more sparkling and dramatic than a gold-threaded toga! We have Calliope Castor and Delphi Aegis with more information. Calliope Castor:  Thanks, Helene. It all began with Dionysus, the god of wine, theater, and debauchery. Inspired by the energy of 1970s New York, Dionysus blessed Studio 54 with his unique magic, turning it into the epicenter of mortal hedonism. Every cocktail, every dazzling dance move, every outrageous outfit carried his signature flair. But Dionysus didn’t just stay behind the scenes—he frequently attended in disguise, mingling with mortals, sharing his wine, and whispering outrageous ideas for theme parties. Delphi Aegis : And where Dionysus goes, the other gods are sure to follow. Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, couldn’t resist the allure of Studio 54. She claimed it as her earthly playground, inspiring romance and drama under the disco lights. Mortals reported a mysterious ‘aura’ around certain guests, who seemed impossibly magnetic. You guessed it—that was Aphrodite, ensuring Studio 54 became not just a club, but  the  place to find love… or at least a thrilling one-night story.” Calliope Castor : Apollo, ever the showman, made sure the music hit just right. He occasionally took the DJ’s booth, creating beats so perfect they compelled even the shyest wallflower to dance. He also nudged aspiring artists and performers to try their luck at the club. Essentially blessing Studio 54 as a hub for creativity. Rumor has it, a few chart-topping hits were whispered directly to musicians by Apollo himself. Delphi Aegis : But it wasn’t all fun and games, Helene. Hera, queen of the gods and protector of marriage, became outraged by the club’s reputation for scandalous behavior. She viewed the excess and infidelity as an affront to her values. Hera’s jealousy and disdain reached their peak when she discovered Zeus himself had attended in disguise, chatting up mortal women and throwing thunderbolt-shaped confetti at a New Year’s party. Furious, Hera orchestrated the club’s downfall by subtly influencing mortal authorities to investigate its shady financial dealings. Calliope Castor : And let’s not forget Hades, the god of the underworld. While he was initially amused by the decadence, things soured when he was denied entry at the door—on multiple occasions! Witnesses say bouncers dismissed him as ‘too gloomy.’ Insulted, Hades cursed the club with misfortune, ensuring that its owners would face legal troubles and that the once-golden nightclub would spiral into chaos. Delphi Aegis : The fall of Studio 54 is a classic tale of hubris. What started as a divine masterpiece became a battlefield for godly egos. By 1980, with Dionysus distracted by a new project in Ibiza and Hera meddling in full force, the dream had faded. Calliope Castor : The moral of the story? If your nightclub becomes the talk of Mount Olympus, enjoy the ride, but watch your tax forms. The gods giveth, and the gods taketh away. Helene Parthenos : Thank you to Calliope and Delphi. You can hear more about the released papers and the investigation on OlympusTV's nighttime special "Deities After Dark: Studio 54 Exposed" premiering this Thursday night at 8pm. That’s all for tonight’s Olympus Insider. Tune in tomorrow for an exclusive look at how Hermes allegedly invented the modern courier service. Until then, remember: the gods are always watching! Final Thoughts Yes, this is a book out of my age range. That being said, I think any age reader could get something out of this book. As I wrote earlier, Rick Riordan poses topics in a way that opens up a discussion at an age appropriate level. At the very least, you get a fun, quick reimagining of ancient myths — or so us mortals must believe. Don't let the mist cloud your vision, Katherine Arkady

Book Information What is the title of the book? Nine Perfect Strangers Who is the author of the book? Liane Moriarty When was the book published? September 18, 2018 What genre does the book belong to? psychological fiction, thriller, and contemporary fiction Are there any notable awards or recognitions the book has received? A   New York Times  Bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2018), Longlisted For The ABIA General Fiction Book Of The Year 2019, Longlisted For The Indie Book Award For Fiction 2019, and was adapted into a tv series on Hulu in 2021. Who are the main characters (for fiction) or key figures (for non-fiction)? Masha Dmitrichenko:  The enigmatic and ambitious director of Tranquillum House. Frances Welty:  A romance novelist dealing with career and personal setbacks. Napoleon, Heather, and Zoe Marconi:  A family mourning the loss of their son/brother. Lars Lee:  A divorce lawyer with commitment issues. Tony Hogburn:  A former professional athlete struggling with his new identity. Ben and Jessica Chandler:  A young couple dealing with marital problems. Carmel Schneider:  A single mother dealing with self-esteem and weight issues. Discussion Questions 1. In Nine Perfect Strangers, there’s a fair amount of commentary about women and their self loathing, especially directed toward their bodies: “Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships. Masha had seen women pinch at the flesh of their stomachs with such brutal self-loathing they left bruises. Meanwhile their husbands fondly patted their own much larger stomachs with rueful pride.” Do you think this is true? Why do you think men and women have such different relationships with their bodies? The entire sentiment referred to in this question is on   page 84 , where Masha explains to the reader:     "Masha had treated a hundred women like Frances. It was simply a matter of peeling back their layers to reveal the heartache beneath. They longed to be peeled, for someone to be interested enough to peel them. It wasn’t hard. They’d been hurt: by husbands and lovers, by children who no longer needed them, by disappointing careers, by life, by death.     They nearly all loathed their bodies. Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships. Masha had seen women pinch at the flesh of their stomachs with such brutal self-loathing they left bruises. Meanwhile their husbands fondly patted their own much larger stomachs with rueful pride.     These women came to Masha overfed and yet malnourished, addicted to various substances and chemicals, exhausted and stressed and experiencing migraines or muscular pain or digestive issues. They were easy to heal with rest and fresh air, nutritious food and attention. Their eyes brightened. They became expansive and exhilarated as their cheekbones re-emerged. They wouldn’t shut up. They left Masha with hugs and tears in their eyes and bright toot-toots of their car horns. They sent heartfelt cards, often with photos enclosed showing how their journeys had continued as they applied Masha’s lessons to their day-to-day lives.     But then, two, three, four years later, a good proportion came back to Tranquillum House, looking as unhealthy as they’d been at their first visits — or even unhealthier. ‘I stopped my morning meditation,’ they would say, all wide-eyed and apologetic, but not that apologetic; they seemed to think their lapses were natural, cute, to be expected. ‘And next thing I was back drinking every day.’ ‘I lost my job.’ ‘I got divorced.’ ‘I had a car accident.’ Masha had only reset them temporarily! In times of crisis they returned to their default settings." Men can just exist. Women have to perform. I'm not going to go into a diatribe about the patriarchy or bring forth any hate. What I   will  bring focus to is this part of the quote above: "They were easy to heal with rest and fresh air, nutritious food and attention. Their eyes brightened. They became expansive and exhilarated as their cheekbones re-emerged." When women are separated from the society that wants them to hate themselves, they can heal. But we live in a society where appearances matter — but the ideal look changes faster than women can keep up so they're in a vicious cycle of changing themselves, finding reasons to hate themselves, and trying to change again only to be disappointed again and again. Poor Carmel, the mother of four daughters and recently divorced. See what she has to say with Masha on   page 191-192 :     “You have already lost some weight, I see.” Masha opened Carmel’s file to begin her counseling session.     ‘Have I?’ said Carmel. She felt like she’d won a prize. ‘How much?’     Masha ignored the question. She ran her finger down a sheet of paper in the file.     ‘I thought I might have lost some — but I wasn’t sure.” Carmel heard her unused voice tremble with pleasure. She hadn’t dared to hope. It seemed that Yao deliberately stood in such a way that she couldn’t see that dreaded number on the scales each day.     She put a hand to her stomach. She had suspected it was getting flatter, her clothes looser! She’d been secretly touching her stomach, like when she was pregnant for the first time. This retreat was just like that euphoric time: the feeling that her body was changing in new and miraculous ways.     ‘I guess I’ll probably lose even more when we start the fast tomorrow?’ Carmel wanted to demonstrate her enthusiasm and commitment to the retreat. She would do whatever it took.     Masha said nothing. She closed Carmel’s file and balanced her chin on her folded hands.     Carmel said, ‘I hope it’s not just fluid loss. They say that in the first few days of a diet you mostly just lose fluid.’     Masha still said nothing.     ‘I know the meals here are all calorie-controlled. I guess the challenge will be maintaining my weight loss when I go home. I’d be really grateful for any nutrition advice you can give me going forward. Maybe a recipe plan?’     “You do not need a recipe plan,’ said Masha. ‘You are intelligent woman. You know what to do to lose weight, if that’s what you want. You are not especially fat. You are not especially thin. You want to be thinner. That is your choice. I find this not so interesting.’     ‘Oh,’ said Carmel. ‘Sorry.’     “Tell me something about yourself that is not related to your weight,’ said Masha.     ‘Well, I have four daughters,’ said Carmel. She smiled at the thought of them. ‘They’re aged ten, eight, seven and five.’     ‘I know this already. You are a mother,’ said Masha. “Tell me something else.’     “My husband left me. He has a new girlfriend now. So that’s been —’     Masha waved that away irritably, as if it were of no relevance. ‘Something else.’     ‘There is nothing else right now,’ said Carmel. ‘There’s no time for anything else. I’m just a normal busy mum. An overweight, stressed-out, suburban mum.’ As she spoke she scanned Masha’s desk for family photos. She must not have children. If she did, she would know how motherhood swallowed you up whole. ‘I work part-time,’ she tried to explain. ‘I have an elderly mother who is not well. I am always tired. Always, always tired.’     Masha sighed, as if Carmel were not behaving." She is so so so much more than what her body looks like, but she' had been whittled down to what she has to offer others (like her ex husband), what she can bring to the world (her four daughters) and how she can look while doing it (in her words, overweight). And she apologizes over and over and over again like she's apologizing for being in anybody's line of sight. She can't be seen, not like this. Like her only worth is how she can perform and appear to others instead of knowing that she has inherent worth just by having love, empathy, and compassion inside of her. My heart breaks knowing so many women that have been whittled down the same way. But men, they can get by with the bare minimum. They can lose or not lose weight. They can be motivated or not motivated. The the conversation between Masha and Tony on   page 196  helps explain this idea:     ‘So how do you hope to change your life?’     ‘I just want to get healthier and fitter,’ said Tony. ‘Drop some weight.’     Men often used that phrase: ‘drop some weight’. They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to ‘lose weight’, with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.     ‘I used to be very fit. I should have done this sooner. I really regret. . .’ Tony stopped, cleared his throat, as if he’d said more than he wanted.     “What do you regret?’ asked Masha.     ‘It’s not anything I’ve done. It’s more everything I haven’ done. I’ve just kind of moped about for twenty years.’     It took a fraction of a second to translate the English word ‘moped’ — a word she didn’t hear much.     “Twenty years is a long time to mope,’ said Masha. Foolish man. She herself had never moped. Not once. Moping was for the weak.     ‘I kind of got into the habit of it,’ said Tony. ‘Not sure how to stop.’     She waited to hear what he would say next. Women liked to be asked questions about themselves but with men it was better to be patient, to be silent and see what eventuated." Or think about what Frances had to say on   page 99  about Lars.     "The flustered lady was followed by an astonishingly handsome man with high cheekbones and flashing eyes, who paused at the front of the room, as if he were a movie star walking out onto the set of a chat show to rapturous applause. He was perfectly stubbled, perfectly proportioned and deeply, deservedly, in love with himself.     Frances wanted to laugh out loud at the sight of him. He was too good looking even to be the tall, dark and handsome hero in one of her books. The only way it would work would be if she put him in a wheelchair. He’d look great in a wheelchair. Honestly, she could probably get away with removing both his legs and he could still play the lead." Do you know what a wheelchair-bound actress with no legs gets?   Unemployment . No matter how high her cheekbones are. And "deeply, deservedly, in love with himself"? Men deserve to be in love with themselves but women have to fight for it? It isn't outright said right there but I'm reading between the lines and noticing the rhetoric Frances uses on others/men and the rhetoric she allows to use for herself. They are not the same. And this dumb, self-sabotaging rhetoric starts so early! Zoe, a baby 21 year old compared to the older adults at the resort, sort of   bonds  with Frances by talking about her family's food intake on  page 114 :     "We just wanted somewhere quiet, and a health resort seemed like a good idea because we’re all really unhealthy.’     "Are you? You don’t look at all unhealthy to me."     "Well, for a start, I have way too much sugar in my diet,’ said Zoe.     "Sugar is the new villain,’ said Frances. ‘It used to be fat. Then it was carbs. It’s hard to keep up.’      "No, but sugar is seriously bad," said Zoe. It wasn’t hard to keep up at all! Everyone knew sugar was terrible for you. “They’ve done all this research. I need to withdraw from my sugar addiction."     "Mmm," said Frances.     "I eat too much chocolate and I’m addicted to Diet Coke, that’s why my skin is so bad." Zoe put a fingertip to a blind pimple near her lip. She couldn’t stop touching it.     “Your skin is gorgeous!" Frances gesticulated wildly, probably because she was trying not to look at Zoe’s pimple.     Zoe sighed. People should be honest.     "My parents are exercise fanatics, but my dad has a junk-food addiction and Mum basically has an eating disorder." She reflected. Her mother would not like any aspect of this conversation. "Please don’t tell her I said that. She doesn’t really have an eating disorder. She’s just kind of weird about food."     Even before Zach died Zoe’s mother had been like that. She couldn’t bear to see lavish displays of food, which was a problem, seeing as she’d married a man with a big extended Italian family. Heather suffered from heartburn and stomach cramps and other ‘digestive issues’ she referred to only obliquely. She never saw food as just food. She always had some fierce emotional response to it. She was starving or bloated or craving something specific and unattainable." It's kind of a shared misery sort of deal. They as women can commiserate with the "joy" of being a woman. But this joy really just sparks vitriol in the end. After getting   very  irritated about the "suffering" endured at the health resort, Heather had this to say on  page 89  about the diet plans:     "Weight was just not an issue for Heather! She weighed herself every morning at six on the dot and if she ever saw the needle move in the wrong direction she adjusted her diet. Her BMI was in the ‘underweight’ category, but only by a kilo. She’d always been lean. Zoe sometimes accused Heather of having an eating disorder, just because she was kind of picky about when and what she ate. She didn’t put just anything in her mouth — unlike Napoleon, who ate like a vacuum cleaner, hoovering up whatever was around him." Throughout this novel, Liane Moriarty does sprinkle opinions of the opposite sex to make her case. Frances' thoughts on the subject are of men that aren't at the resort. Same for Carmel. Heather's very direct, some may say   snide  comments about her husband on  page 88  were set in the present moment and that was a little more powerful for me. Check it out:     "[Heather] studied [Napoleon] as he sat in his too-short dressing-gown, his long hairy legs entwined. He had a feminine way of crossing his legs, like a supermodel being interviewed on a talk show. His two shorter, chunkier older brothers gave him hell about the girly way he sat, but he just grinned and gave them the finger." I have many reasons to believe that Heather, had   she  heard from sisters that she sat in a  manly  way or anything not  perfect feminine , that she would immediately change her posture and do her best to avoid sitting that way ever again. Even in the privacy of her own home. Women have to check themselves so often that they've spilled over in their efforts and now begun having opinions about other women! Like this   page 94   read  Heather did on Frances:     "[Frances] looked vaguely familiar to Heather — probably because Heather knew SO many women just like her: wealthy middle-aged women who hadn’t worked since before their children were born. There was nothing wrong with those women. Heather liked them. She just couldn’t be with them for too long without succumbing to rage. They were utterly unscathed by life. The only thing they had to worry about was their bodies, because all that lunching didn’t help their figures, so they needed to come to places like this to ‘recharge’ and to hear the experts tell them the amazing news that if you eat less and move more, you will weigh less and feel better." As readers, we know that that's not at all true. But, as women, I think we are guilty of having unfounded, stereotypical opinions just like Heather's about other women. This is a deep and complex conversation to have with any and all women of the world. That's the opposite of an easy task. But I think Liane Moriarty offers up an excellent starting point for the conversations to begin. I know after reading this, I've started to ask myself "What would Masha say about my body?" She would say it's the least interesting thing about me and that my heart and my soul will be what saves me from myself. Here are more spots of interest for this question: pg 53     Frances averted her eyes from the number. She had no idea of her weight and no interest in learning it. She knew she could be thinner, and of course when she was younger she was indeed much thinner, but she was generally happy with her body as long as it wasn’t giving her pain, and bored by all the different ways women droned on about the subject of weight, as if it were one of the great mysteries of life. The recent weight-losers, evangelical about whatever method had worked for them, the thin women who called themselves fat, the average women who called themselves obese, the ones desperate for her to join in their lavish self-loathing. ‘Oh, Frances, isn’t it just so depressing when you see young, thin girls like that!’ ‘Not especially,’ Frances would say, adding extra butter to her bread roll. pg 54     The man lagged behind to put on glasses so he could closely examine the wall on the landing. He was so tall the dressing-gown was more like a miniskirt, revealing knobbly knees and very white, very hairy legs. They were the sort of male legs that made you feel uncomfortable, as if you were looking at a private part of the body. pg 82     She turned sideways in her chair and lifted one leg, pressing her forehead to her shinbone. She occupied her body with the ease of a ten-year-old boy and she liked to say that she was only ten years old, because it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of the day it happened. Her cardiac arrest. The day she died and was born again. pg 102 As Frances’s eyes ran over Masha’s exquisitely toned body and compared it to her own, she sank into herself. She was Jabba the Hutt, all pillowy bosom and hips and soft oozing flesh. Stop it , she told herself. It wasn’t like her to indulge in self-loathing. Yet it would be disingenuous to deny the aesthetic pleasure of Masha’s body. Frances had never bought into ‘everyone is beautiful’, a platitude only women had to be sold, as men could be beautiful or not without feeling as though they weren’t really men. This woman, like the handsome man, had a dramatic, almost shocking physical presence. Frances had to talk or write or flirt or joke or in some way act before she could make an impact on people around her, otherwise, as she knew from experience, she could stand at a counter in a shop and be ignored forever. No-one could ignore Masha. All she had to do for attention was exist. pg 156     The serial killer dropped his bath towel on a deckchair (you were meant to use the stripy blue-and-white towels from reception, but rules didn’t apply to him), walked straight to the edge of the pool and, without even bothering to put in his toe to check the temperature, dived straight in. Frances did a sedate breaststroke in the other direction.     Now she was stuck in the pool because she didn’t want to get out in front of him. She would have thought she was too old to worry about her body being observed and judged in a swimsuit, but apparently this neurosis began at twelve years old and   never ended.     The problem was that she wanted to convey strength in all her future interactions with this man, and her soft white body, especially when compared to Masha’s Amazonian example, damn her, didn’t convey anything much except fifty-two years of good living and a weakness for Lindt chocolate balls. The serial killer would no doubt be the type to rank every woman based on his own personal ‘Would I fuck her?’ score.     She remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers while his hands were on her breasts, as if she’d find this interesting, as if   women’s body parts were dishes on a menu and men were the goddamned diners.     This is what she said to that first boyfriend: ‘Sorry.’     This was her first boyfriend’s benevolent reply: ‘That’s okay.’     She couldn’t blame her upbringing for her pathetic behaviour. When Frances was eight years old, a man patted her mother’s bottom as he walked past them on a suburban street. ‘Nice arse,’ he said in a friendly tone. Frances remembered thinking,   Oh, that’s kind of him.  And then she’d watched in shock as her five-foot-nothing mother chased the man to the comer and swung a heavy handbag full of hardback library books at the back of his head.     Right. Enough was enough. She would get out of the pool, at her own pace. She would not rush to grab up her towel to throw over her body.     Wait.     She didn’t   want  to get out of the pool! She was here first. Why should she get out just because he was here? She would enjoy her swim and then she would get out. pg 168-171     Remembering this, she’d picked up speed, her arms and legs chopping through the water, harder and harder, faster and faster, but she couldn’t sustain it, she wasn’t fit enough, she was so unfit, and fat, and lazy, and disgusting. And she thought of her four girls on the other side of the world, in Paris, where Carmel had never been, having their hair done by Sonia, and probably sitting still for her, and suddenly she swallowed a giant mouthful of water.     She hopped out of the pool, without making eye contact with the friendly blonde lady, as per the rules, fortunately, because she was crying like a fool, and she cried all the way to her room. There was no way the big man coming down the pathway to the pool hadn’t noticed.     ‘Get a grip,’ she said now to her reflection in the mirror.     She wrapped her arms around her body.     She missed her children. It hit her like a sudden fever. She longed for the comfort of their four beautiful little-girl bodies and their heedless, proprietorial use of her body: the way they plonked themselves on her lap as if she were a chair, the way they burrowed their hot little heads into her stomach, her breasts. She was always yelping at someone, ‘Get off me!’ When she was with her children, she was needed — essential, in fact: everything relied on her. Someone was always saying, ‘Where’s Mummy?’ ‘I’m telling Mum what you just said.” ‘Mummmmmy!’     Now she was untethered by obligations, as loose and free as a balloon.     She undid the tie of her swimsuit and let it fall in a heap on the bathroom floor while she studied her naked body in the mirror.     Carmel let her breasts drop and put a hand to the curve of her stomach. Average wasn’t good enough. Average was too big. Everyone knew that. There was an obesity crisis in this country! She didn’t want to fat-shame other people, but she certainly wanted to fat-shame herself because she deserved to be shamed. She used to be two sizes smaller and the reason she was now two sizes larger was not because of her four daughters; it was because she didn’t ‘take care of herself’. Women were meant to ‘take care of themselves’. That’s what men said on dating websites: I’d like a woman who takes care of herself. They meant: I want a thin woman.     And it wasn’t like the information wasn’t available on how to take care of yourself! Everyone knew you simply cut out carbs and sugar and trans fats from your diet! Celebrities generously revealed their secrets. They snacked on a ‘handful of nuts’ or ‘two squares of dark antioxidant-rich chocolate’! They drank a lot of water, stayed out of the sun and took the stairs! It wasn’t rocket science! But did Carmel ever take the stairs? No, she didn’t.     It was true that she often had the kids with her, and if they walked up too many stairs one of them was liable to run too far ahead while another one sat down and announced that her legs no longer worked, but still, there must have been times when Carmel could have built some ‘incidental exercise’ into her lifestyle. And yet she hadn’t. She neglected her body, she didn’t get her hair cut for months on end, her eyebrows were left unplucked, she forgot to shave her legs, and it was no surprise her husband left her, because, as she tried to teach her children, actions had consequences.     She thought of the long, sculpted lines of Masha’s body.     She imagined Masha living Carmel’s life, standing at the front door when Joel and Sonia dropped off the girls. Joel wouldn’t have left Masha in the first place, but say he did, then Masha’s heart wouldn’t hammer with pain and humiliation at the sight of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend. Masha wouldn’t curve her body around the door at a strange angle as if to hide it from Joel. Masha would stand tall and proud. She wouldn’t hunch her body to protect her raw, broken heart.     Her sister said Joel’s so-called ‘lack of attraction’ was Joel’s problem, not hers. Her sister said Carmel should learn self-love and texted her links to articles about ‘intuitive eating’ and ‘healthy at any size’. Carmel knew these articles were written by fat people to make fat people feel better about their sad, fat lives.     If she could transform her body, she could transform her life, and she could move on from her failed marriage. That wasn’t deluded. That was a fact.     Her sister, who was both wealthy and generous — a most excellent combination — gave Carmel a card for her birthday that said:   Carmel, I don’t think you need to lose weight. You’re beautiful and Joel is a shallow idiot and you should give ZERO FUCKS what he thinks. But if you’re determined to go on a health kick, I want you to do it in style and comfort. I’ve booked you into Tranquillum House for their ten-day cleanse while the kids are away. Enjoy! Ness xx PS And then come home and eat cheese.      Carmel hadn’t been that happy to receive a gift since she was a child.     Now she thought of Masha’s words: ‘In ten days, you will not be the person you are now.’ The word ‘please’ filled her mind. Please, please, please, let that be true, please, please, please, let me become someone other than this. She looked at her stupid, dopey, pleading face in the mirror. Her skin was rough and red like an old washerwoman’s hands. There was a picket fence of tiny lines neatly indented across her top lip, which was so thin it disappeared when she smiled. The only part of her body that was thin was her top lip. Lips were meant to be plump rosebuds, not mean, thin, disappearing lines.     Oh, Carmel, of course he stopped being attracted to you! What were you thinking? How could he possibly be attracted to someone who looks like you? She lifted her hand to slap her face once more. 4. “Carmel wasn’t wearing a body. It was so wonderful and relaxing not wearing a body. No thighs. No stomach. No bum. No biceps. No triceps. No cellulite. No crow’s feet. No frown marks. No caesarean scar. No sun damage. No fine lines. No seven signs of aging. No dry hair. No frizzy hair. No gray hair. Nothing to wax or color or condition. Nothing to lengthen or flatten, conceal or disguise.” What did you think of this scene when Carmel was body shopping? What point do you think the author was trying to make? Can you relate to this? Why, or why not? I think this further explains my point that men can exist and women have to perform. Do you think Lars or Tony or Napoleon would have shopped for a body? Do you think they would have any concern? Yes, according to Masha on   page 85  Lars, "saw attendance at health resorts as a part of his grooming regime, like a haircut or a manicure." But I'd go so far as to say that Lars did these things "on top" like it was extra because he didn't really need to. You get where I'm going? It's like women don't get to live in their bodies like men get to. They have to change everything about it. Instead of their body feeling like a cozy home they've lived in all their life, their body feels like a hotel room in a country they don't speak the language of. For example, Frances on   page 52 :     "Frances looked back to her arm, and then quickly away again as she caught sight of a test tube filling with her blood. She hadn’t even registered the prick of the needle. She felt all at once as powerless as a child, and was reminded of the few times in her life she’d had to go into hospital for minor surgeries, and how much she disliked the lack of control over her body. Nurses and doctors had the right to prod at her as they pleased, with no love or desire or affection, just expertise. It always took a few days to fully reinhabit her body again." I also think it was especially powerful to have Carmel body shopping with her daughters. The entire experience is on   pages 252-254 , though these particular two spots stood out to me:     "Her daughter Lulu put down her book. She had peach smeared around her mouth. Carmel went to wipe it away but then she remembered she had no fingers. Fingers were useful.     “That’s your body there, Mummy,’ said Lulu, and she pointed at Carmel’s body sagging on a door handle, without even a hanger.     “That’s my old body, darling,’ said Carmel. ‘Mummy needs a new one.’     ‘It’s yours.” Lulu was implacable as always." Little Lulu is of an age where those problems haven't begun to matter to her. That body is her Mom's body and there's no changing it. Oh, to be carefree like a young girl. Furthermore, when Carmel comes to terms with her body: "Her daughters threw themselves at her. Carmel marveled at the blue veins in her hands as she cupped her daughters’ heads, the thump of her heart and the strength of her arms as she hefted a little girl on each hip." Because the girls don't care about their mom's wrinkles or cellulite. They couldn't care less about Carmel's hair. Not the shape (or lack of shape) of any part of her body. The girls cared about Carmel's capacity for love. That her heart beat with love for them. That her arms hugged the love into them. That Carmel was their mother. That is what matters in the end. Life is long. Bodies change. Love endures. 6. At one point Jessica says, “The question is: Who gets to decide if I’m beautiful or not? Me? You? The internet?” And later, “Jessica thought those dreadful Kardashians were stunning. It was her prerogative to think so. Before the money Ben had drooled over images of luxury cars and Jessica had drooled over pictures of models and reality stars, that were maybe photoshopped, but she didn’t care. He got his car, she got her body. Why was her new body more superficial than his new car?” How much do you think our notions of beauty are shaped by social media? Does Jessica have a point about her body versus Ben’s car? Do you think women are made to feel superficial about what makes them feel good versus men? I think social media has become a huge performative act. Appear wealthy. Appear thin. Appear well-liked. Appear anything good for your "image" or "brand." Can't do that? Doesn't even matter! There are blurring filters. There are buildable façades. There are ways of faking it. But does it matter? More specifically, does it matter to you and the people whose opinion you care about?   Page 37  gives us Ben's take regarding Jessica:     "One of their biggest fights recently had been about one of her Instagram posts. It was a photo of her in a bikini top, leaning over, pushing her arms together so her new boobs looked even bigger and pouting her puffy new lips at the camera. She’d asked what he thought of the photo, her face all hopeful, and because of her hopeful face he hadn’t said what he really thought — that it looked like she was advertising a cheap escort service. He’d just shrugged and said, ‘It’s okay.’       Her hopeful face fell. You’d think he’d called her a name." Jessica is the "influencer" character of the story and really struggling without being connected to her online world. On   page 137 , readers get inside her mind:     "They hadn’t been having sex. Ben had been asleep and Jessica had been lying next to him in the darkness, unable to sleep, missing her phone so badly it felt like she’d had something amputated. When she couldn’t sleep at home she simply picked up her phone and scrolled through Instagram and Pinterest until she got tired.     She looked at her scarlet toenails in the moonlight. If she had her phone with her right now she would have photographed her feet, together with Ben’s feet, and tagged it #starlightmeditation #healthretreat #learningaboutkoans #wejustsawafallingstar #whatisthesoundofonehandclapping.     That last hashtag would have made her look quite intellectual and spiritual, she thought, which was good, because you had to be careful not to come across as superficial on your socials.     She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she didn’t record this moment on her phone then it wasn’t really happening, it didn’t count, it wasn’t real life. She knew that was irrational but she couldn’t help it. She literally felt twitchy without her phone. Obviously she was addicted to it. Still, better than being addicted to heroin, though these days no-one was sure about Ben’s sister’s most recent drug of choice. She liked to ‘mix it up’." Many characters have a bit of a struggle with being "off grid." Like Frances on   page 58 :     "‘No problem.’ Frances retrieved her phone from her handbag, switched it off, and handed it to Yao. A not unpleasant feeling of subservience crept over her. It was like being on an airplane once the seatbelt sign was turned on and the flight attendants were now in charge of your entire existence." Heather, on   Page 92 , kind of imposes the problem for Zoe:     "Heather looked at the wall above their bed that separated their room from Zoe’s and wished she could see straight through it. What was she doing right now? She didn’t have her phone. Twenty-year-olds needed their phones by their sides at all times. Zoe found it stressful if her battery power dropped below eighty per cent." Maybe Heather is enabling this idea of dependency. Maybe she's just an over-concerned mother who has already lost one child. But it does bring focus on the need people have for their objects and how objects can sometimes give people "meaning," "worth," or "acceptance." For example, Ben and his precious beautiful amazing important Lamborghini on   Page 121 :     ‘Are there any more areas of concern before we resume the silence?’     Ben raised his hand. Masha observed his wife flash him a look of horror and move slightly away.     ‘Um, yeah, I have just one question. Are the cars parked undercover?’     She looked at him for a moment, long enough to help him see the sadness of this deep attachment to his earthly possessions.     He shifted uncomfortably.     “They are parked undercover, Ben. Please don’t worry, they are perfectly safe.’     ‘Okay, but, um, where are the cars? I’ve walked around the property and I just can’t see where...” As he spoke he removed his cap and briskly rubbed the top of his head.     For the briefest of moments, Masha saw another boy wearing a baseball cap walking towards her, so strange and yet so familiar. She felt the love rise within her chest and she crossed her arms so she could secretly pinch the flesh on her arm, hard enough to hurt, until the vision vanished, and all that was left was here and now and the important tasks that lay ahead.     ‘As I said, Ben, everyone’s cars are perfectly safe.’     He opened his mouth to speak yet again and his wife hissed something inaudible through her teeth. He closed his mouth." He's at a health resort and can't get away from the idea that his car is out of sight. And on   Page 271 , Jessica has an admission: "‘I feel like you love your car more than me,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m jealous of your car. I was the one who scratched it. That was me. Because I feel like your car is a slutty girl having an affair with my husband, and so I scratched her slutty face.’     ‘Wow,’ said Ben. He put both hands to the top of his head. ‘Wow. That is . . . wow. I can’t believe you did that.’ He didn’t sound angry. Just amazed." Having a lot of weight on material goods can take a toll. Jessica and Ben weren't always this way. They were married before winning millions in the lottery. And Jessica is able to admit on   page 142  that,     "[She] and Ben fought more about money now that they had an abundance of it. It was impossible to even imagine they’d once felt so upset about the arrival of unexpected bills.     Becoming instantly wealthy was like starting a really stressful, glamorous job for which they had no qualifications or experience, but still, it was a pretty great job. It was hardly something to complain about. There was no need to ruin it, as Ben seemed intent on doing." And more to the point on   page 140 :     "But even on that first night, even while Ben and his brothers argued drunkenly over which luxury cars to buy, Jessica could sense Ben’s fear growing.     ‘Make sure it doesn’t change us,’ he slurred, just before they fell asleep that night, and Jessica thought,   What are you talking about? It’s already changed us!     Then there was Jessica’s mother, who acted as if the win were a catastrophe.     “You have to be so careful, Jessica,’ she said. “This kind of money can send people off the rails.     It was true that there had been some unexpected difficulties with this new life. Some tricky situations they were still trying to unravel. Friendships they’d lost. One family estrangement. Two family estrangements. No. Three." I think social media has exacerbated the "need" for women to look a certain standard. All we want to do is be accepted and it's harder and harder to do with all these micro trends. Do you have a fox face or a cat face? Are you clean girl or mob wife aesthetic? Are you going to get your hair colored old money bronde or cowboy copper? Are you a soft girl or are you in your villain era? So we're forced to care about these things but then get slapped in the face with labels like "superficial" and "materialistic" when we carry them out. Like we're being punished for having to try and be those things instead of automatically being those things "without trying." We can't win! Ben even gives us insight on   pages 37-38 : "‘Look at me!’ she screamed. ‘You don’t even look at me anymore!’     And it killed him to hear her say that, because it was true. He avoided looking at her. He was trying really hard to get over that. There were men who stayed married to women who were disfigured by accidents, burns or scars or whatever. It shouldn’t make a difference that Jessica was disfigured by her own hand. Not literally her own hand. Her own credit card. Willful disfigurement.        And then all her stupid friends encouraged her. ‘Oh my God, Jessica, you look incredible.’     He wanted to yell at them, ‘Are you blind? She looks like a chipmunk!’     The thought of separating from Jessica was like having his guts ripped out, but these days being married to Jessica was like having his guts ripped out. Whatever way you looked at it: guts ripped out." This, again, is deep and complex conversation to have. But, again, also I think Liane Moriarty offers up an excellent starting point for the conversations to begin. Spoiler alert, it didn't end well for Ben and Jessica, but I think they both found their own happinesses. Maybe not the ones they wanted for each other, but happinesses all the same. On   page 438 :     "Ben thought first about ringing Jessica. They were on very good terms, although he still squirmed with embarrassment when he thought about the post she’d put on Instagram ‘announcing’ their split, as if they were a celebrity couple who owed it to their public to let them know the true story before the media began hounding them. She wrote: We’ll always be best friends but we’ve decided the time has come to lovingly separate.     Right now, Jessica was in the middle of auditioning for the next season of The Bachelor. She said it wasn’t so much that she wanted to find love, and she doubted she would, but it would be great for her ‘profile’ and it would guarantee her so many thousand more Instagram followers. He couldn’t laugh too much because she was an ‘ambassador’ for multiple charities and her Instagram account was filled with photos of glamorous lunches and balls and breakfasts that she and a new group of society friends were so ‘honored’ to have organized.     Ben was back working with Pete. The guys gave him a hard time in the beginning — ‘You short of a buck, mate?’ — but eventually they gave up and forgot he was rich. Ben still had the car, and a nice house, but he’d put a lot of his money into a foundation run by his mother to help support families of addicts." So, please, go where the wind takes you and where you feel the most authentic. Social media is built to give you FOMO or issues with your self confidence. How else would they get people glued to the screens? Be rebellious and see what you want to be without any influence from the heavily filtered, heavily curated, "highlights" of others online. Here are more spots of interest for this question: pg 36-38     Some celebrity couple had come to this place and saved their marriage. They had ‘achieved inner peace’ and got back in touch with their ‘true selves’. What a load of crap. They may as well have handed over their money to Nigerian email scammers. Ben had a horrible feeling the celebrity couple might have got together on The Bachelorette. Jessica loved celebrities. He used to think it was sweet, a dumb interest for a smart girl. But now she was making too many life decisions based on what celebrities did, or what it was reported they did; it was probably all crap anyway, they were probably getting paid to support products on their Instagram accounts. And there was Jessica, his poor innocent, hopeful Jessica, soaking it all up.     Now it was like she thought she was one of those people. She was imagining herself at those trashy red-carpet events. Every time she got her photo taken these days she put her hand on her hip, like she was doing the actions for ‘I’m a Little Teapot’, then turned side on and thrust out her jaw with this maniacal smile. It was the weirdest thing. And the time she took setting up these photographs. The other day she had spent forty-two minutes (he’d timed it) taking a photo of her feet.     One of their biggest fights recently had been about one of her Instagram posts. It was a photo of her in a bikini top, leaning over, pushing her arms together so her new boobs looked even bigger and pouting her puffy new lips at the camera. She’d asked what he thought of the photo, her face all hopeful, and because of her hopeful face he hadn’t said what he really thought — that it looked like she was advertising a cheap escort service. He’d just shrugged and said, ‘It’s okay.’     Her hopeful face fell. You’d think he’d called her a name. Next thing he knew she was screaming at him (these days she could go from zero to a hundred in a second) and he felt sucker-punched, unable to understand what had just happened. So he’d walked away while she was in the middle of yelling and went upstairs to play the Xbox. He thought walking away was a good thing to do. A mature, manly thing to do. To disengage and give her time to calm down. He kept getting these things wrong. She ran up the stairs after him and grabbed the back of his t-shirt before he reached the top.     ‘Look at me!’ she screamed. ‘You don’t even look at me anymore!’     And it killed him to hear her say that, because it was true. He avoided looking at her. He was trying really hard to get over that. There were men who stayed married to women who were disfigured by accidents, burns or scars or whatever. It shouldn’t make a difference that Jessica was disfigured by her own hand. Not literally her own hand. Her own credit card. Willful disfigurement.        And then all her stupid friends encouraged her. ‘Oh my God, Jessica, you look incredible.’     He wanted to yell at them, ‘Are you blind? She looks like a chipmunk!’     The thought of separating from Jessica was like having his guts ripped out, but these days being married to Jessica was like having his guts ripped out. Whatever way you looked at it: guts ripped out.     If this retreat worked, if they got back to the way they used to be, it was even worth the damage to the car. Obviously, it was worth it. Jessica was meant to be the mother of his children — his future children. pg 58     ‘No problem.’ Frances retrieved her phone from her handbag, switched it off, and handed it to Yao. A not unpleasant feeling of subservience crept over her. It was like being on an aeroplane once the seatbelt sign was turned on and the flight attendants were now in charge of your entire existence.     ‘Great. Thanks. You’re officially “off the grid”!’ Yao held up her phone. ‘We'll keep it safe. Some guests say the digital detox is one of the most enjoyable elements of their time with us. When it’s time to leave, you’ll be saying, “Don’t give it back! I don’t want it back!”’ He held up his hands to indicate someone waving him away. pg 64     Ben took a giant bite of the apple. Jessica couldn’t do that anymore, not with her new capped teeth. The dentist wanted her to wear some sort of a mouthguard at night to keep her expensive crowns all safe. It was annoying that the better the stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it. It was like the new rug in their hallway. Neither of them could bear to walk on something so astoundingly expensive. They shuffled down the sides and winced when their guests marched straight down the middle in dirty sneakers. pg 142 B     He enjoyed the luxury holidays they took, but even the travel didn’t truly make him happy. Jessica remembered a night watching the sun set in Santorini. It was incredible, gorgeous, and she’d just bought a stunning bracelet for herself, and she’d looked across at Ben, who was deep in what seemed like profound thought, and she said, ‘What are you thinking about?’     ‘Lucy,’ he answered. ‘I remember she used to talk about travelling to the Greek islands.’     It made her want to scream and scream because they could afford to send Lucy to Santorini and put her up at a great hotel, but that wasn’t possible because Lucy preferred to stick needles in her arms. So fine, let her ruin her own life, but why did she have to ruin their lives as well? pg 270-271     ‘I miss your face,’ Ben said to Jessica. ‘Your beautiful face. I don’t recognise you. I don’t recognise us or anything about our lives. I miss our old flat. I miss my job. I miss the friends we lost because of this. But most of all I miss your face.’     His words were crisp and clear. There was no slurring. No equivocation.     ‘Good,’ said Masha. ‘Wonderful. Jessica, what do you want to say?’     ‘I think that Ben is body-shaming,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m still me. I’m still Jessica. I’m still in here! So what if I look a bit different? This is the fashion. It’s just fashion. It’s not important!’     ‘It’s important to me,’ said Ben. ‘It feels like you took something precious and fucked it up.’     ‘But I feel beautiful,’ said Jessica. ‘I feel like I was ugly before and now I’m beautiful.’ She stretched her arms above her head like a ballerina. “The question is: who gets to decide if I’m beautiful or not? Me? You? The internet?’     Right now, she did look beautiful.     Ben considered for a moment.     ‘It’s your face,’ he said. ‘So I guess you should decide.’     ‘But wait! Beauty is ...’ Jessica pointed at her eye. She began to laugh. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’     She and Ben laughed and laughed. They clutched each other, repeating ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ over and over, and Masha smiled at them uncertainly. Why was that funny? Perhaps it was an inside joke. She began to feel impatient.     At long last they stopped laughing and Jessica sat up and touched her lower lip. ‘Look. Fair call. I might have overdone it on the lips last time.’     ‘I liked your lips before,’ said Ben. ‘I thought you had beautiful lips.’     “Yeah, I get it, Ben,’ said Jessica.     ‘I liked our life before,’ said Ben     ‘It was a shitty little life,’ said Jessica. ‘An ordinary shitty little life.’     ‘I don’t think it was shitty,’ said Ben.     ‘I feel like you love your car more than me,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m jealous of your car. I was the one who scratched it. That was me. Because I feel like your car is a slutty girl having an affair with my husband, and so I scratched her slutty face.’     ‘Wow,’ said Ben. He put both hands to the top of his head. ‘Wow. That is... wow. I can’t believe you did that.’ He didn’t sound angry. Just amazed. 9. Nine Perfect Strangers looks at the notion of transformation. “Oh, to be transformed, to be someone else, to be someone better.” Do you think these nine characters are really looking to be transformed? What does transformation mean to you? Do you think it’s really possible? I mean...who wouldn't want to be transformed? I've gone through a lot of transformations with different jobs, different relationships, and becoming a (generally) well adjusted adult through therapy. I joke that I've lived thirteen different lives. But I also wouldn't mind some more transformations. I used to say (until my therapist told me it's not a great mindset to be in) that "I'm here...but I want to be   there ." To quote John Mayer: "I am not done changing / Out on the run, changing / I may be old and I may be young / But I am not done changing." I absolutely believe it's possible to transform yourself,   but you have to put in a lot of work to do so. And I think all of the characters wanted a transformation...in their own way. Frances Welty  was literally scammed by a guy pretending to have this life that he wanted her to be a part of. She fell in love with his son and, after a "car accident" they needed money. Frances sent it. And never heard from Paul again. She's a novelist and her career is dwindling so she must come to terms with that. On   page 17 , she tells herself, "I'm only temporarily tragic." And I think that rings true for Frances. I think, at Tranquillum House, she was looking for a way to rekindle her belief in herself. She craves the reassurance that she hasn’t lost her worth or relevance as a writer or a person. Her desire for transformation, to me, was more about healing from her recent wounds rather than a fundamental change in her identity. Napoleon, Heather, and Zoe Marconi   are mourning the loss of their son/brother after a suicide. They are all carrying this immense grief and transformation would mean finding a way to move forward. On   page 201 , readers get insight from Napoleon's thought process:     "Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.      While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation." On the surface, the Marconi's (bless my poor brain for consistently reading the   Macaroni  Family) claim they’re seeking closure or a way to feel “normal” again. However, their deeper struggle revolves around acceptance. They don't need to be changed any more. but they  do  need to accept that this terrible thing happened to their family. That's the only way to start healing. Lars Lee  is a divorce lawyer with commitment issues. That makes a lot of sense. What doesn't make a lot of sense is that he's got fears of being tied down (even though he's in a long term relationship??). Lars, the health resort junkie, is content with his life. It's his boyfriend with the problem. As explained on   page 134 :     "If Ray really wanted to be a father, should Lars let him go be one with someone else? But wasn’t that up to Ray? If Ray couldn’t live without children, then he was free to leave. They weren’t married. The house was in both their names, but they were both financially secure and sufficiently intelligent people to work all that out. Obviously Lars could handle a fair division of property.     Was it the only way forward? Had their relationship reached an impossible impasse because, either way, one of them had to make an impossible sacrifice? Whose sacrifice was worse?     But Ray had stopped asking! He’d accepted it. Lars felt that Ray wanted something else from him. What was it? Permission to leave? He didn’t want Ray to leave." If he and Ray were to have a baby, that would be it. Permanent. No going back. That would mean lars makes himself open an vulnerable to loss and heartbreak. But it also opens Lars up to a deeper love full of acceptance. He gets there eventually, but the LSD definitely helped. Tony "Smiley" Hogburn  is a former  American football tight end  struggling with his identity after retiring. He's not very smily, despite what his nickname and bum tattoos say. He used to be revered for his athleticism but now has estranged family, grandkids he hardly knows, and grief for the loss of his beloved dog, Banjo. He's super cynical about the benefits of health resorts. He's stubborn to change, but he knows he needs to. Even if it took some LSD. On  page 250 , he comes to this realization:       "Tony ran across an endless field of emerald green carrying an oddly shaped football that weighed as much as three bricks. His arms ached. Footballs weren’t normally that heavy.     Banjo ran along beside him, he was a puppy again, bounding along with the same joyful abandon as a toddler, getting in between Tony’s legs, tail wagging.     Tony understood that if he wanted to be happy again, he simply needed to kick this strange misshapen football through the goal. The football represented everything he hated about himself: all his mistakes, his regrets and his shame.     ‘Sit!’ he said to Banjo.     Banjo sat. His big brown eyes looked up at Tony trustingly.     ‘Stay,’ he said.     Banjo stayed. His tail whooshed back and forth across the grass.     Tony saw the white goalposts rise like skyscrapers above him.     He lifted his foot, made contact. The ball sailed in a perfect arc across a clear blue sky. He knew immediately it was good. That rollercoaster feeling in his stomach. There was nothing better. Better than sex. It had been so long." I think his connections with the other guests of Tranquillum House were the catalyst of transformation. Nobody knew who he was and they still chatted with him. When they found out who he was, they treated him no different — except for Napoleon, who was a fanboy about it. And any stubbornness was shattered when he thought he was going to die from the "fire" Masha set. On   page 399 :     "He wasn’t ready to die. Fifty-six years wasn’t long enough. His life felt suddenly incredibly rich and abundant with possibility. He wanted to repaint the house, get another dog, a puppy; it wouldn’t be betraying Banjo to get a puppy. He always got another puppy in the end. He wanted to go to the beach, eat a big breakfast at the cafe down the road while he read the paper, listen to music — it was like he’d forgotten music existed! He wanted to travel to Holland and see his granddaughter perform in one of those stupid Irish dancing competitions." Tony’s transformation is about redefining what it means to be strong. For most of his life, strength was physical, tied to his success as an athlete. But his time at Tranquillum House helps him see that real strength comes from emotional resilience, vulnerability, and the courage to start over. By the end, Tony starts to embrace the possibility of a new life (with Frances!!!). He reconnects with his family and gets a new puppy too! Ben and Jessica Chandler   are a young couple whose marriage is on the rocks because of materialistic pursuits and lack of meaningful connection. Despite Ben's eyeroll explanation of why they went to Tranquillum House ("Some celebrity couple had come to this place and saved their marriage. They had ‘achieved inner peace’ and got back in touch with their ‘true selves’. What a load of crap") I think they were both there to rediscover their love and reprioritize what matters in their marriage. Ben wants to fix the relationship just like Jessica does! on   page 38 : "If this retreat worked, if they got back to the way they used to be, it was even worth the damage to the car. Obviously, it was worth it. Jessica was meant to be the mother of his children — his future children." It's not for lack of effort. The problem is that they try to fix their deep rooted problems with surface fixes like physical appearance, possessions, or luxurious experiences. BUT the real transformation they need is internal: recognizing the emptiness of their superficial pursuits and learning to appreciate each other on a deeper level. Whether they’re truly ready to embrace that transformation is questionable. Their ending was not at all surprising, I'll just say that. And not the ending in the Hulu tv series! Carmel Schneider   is a divorced mother of four and she sees herself as only that. She associates weight loss and external changes with regaining control and feeling desirable again. From page 171 :     "Now she thought of Masha’s words: ‘In ten days, you will not be the person you are now.’ The word ‘please’ filled her mind. Please, please, please, let that be true, please, please, please, let me become someone other than this. She looked at her stupid, dopey, pleading face in the mirror. Her skin was rough and red like an old washerwoman’s hands. There was a picket fence of tiny lines neatly indented across her top lip, which was so thin it disappeared when she smiled. The only part of her body that was thin was her top lip. Lips were meant to be plump rosebuds, not mean, thin, disappearing lines.     Oh, Carmel, of course he stopped being attracted to you! What were you thinking? How could he possibly be attracted to someone who looks like you? She lifted her hand to slap her face once more." What she truly needed was a transformation to see her own worth is beyond her appearance or her role as a mother. And she does that! She finds empowerment and even befriends the new girlfriend of her ex husband. That's camaraderie of her fellow woman! Masha Dmitrichenko   was going for the biggest transformation of all! She'd already survived a heart attack. She had changed her entire life around from the "filth" it was before. She likes transformation like Lars likes health resorts. She wanted to give transformations out like Oprah gives out cars! You get an LSD-laced smoothie! You get an LSD-laced smoothie! But when you focus on giving, you run the risk of emptying your own cup. She transformed a lot, but that transformations didn't get deep enough for her to process the loss of her child. I hope that for her. Her former husband still believes it's possible. On   page 447 , he says:     "He wouldn’t give up. One day Masha would answer. One day she would weaken, or find the strength, and she would answer.     He knew her better than anyone.     One day she would." So I think the most important transformation for Masha is still ahead of her. Here are more spots of interest for this question: pg 49 The studio did have a lovely, peaceful feel to it, and Frances thought she would enjoy being here, even though she wasn’t that keen on yoga or meditation. She had done a transcendental meditation course years ago, hoping for enlightenment, and every time, without fail, she’d nod off within two minutes of focusing on her breathing, waking up at the end to discover that everyone else had experienced flashes of light, memories of past lives and rapture or whatever, while she’d snoozed and drooled. Basically, she’d paid to have a forty-minute nap at the local high school once a week. No doubt she would be spending a lot of time napping down here, dreaming of wine. pg 58 Frances tried to imagine herself in ten days and found it strangely difficult, as if it wasn’t ten days but ten years she was imagining. Would she really be transformed? Thinner, lighter, pain-free, able to leap from her bed at sunrise without caffeine? pg 93 Heather: She’d spent days kicking herself. They didn’t need to be ‘transformed’. There was nothing wrong with their bodies. Everyone always said the three of them were exercise fanatics! This wasn’t the place for the Marconis; it was the place for people like that woman Napoleon had accosted on the stairs. What was her name? Frances. You could tell just by looking at her that she filled her life with lunches and facials and her husband’s work functions. pg 103     Masha repeated, "In ten days, you will not be the person you are now."     No one moved.     Frances felt hope rise in the room like a delicate mist. Oh, to be transformed, to be someone else, to be someone better.     “You will leave Tranquillum House feeling happier, healthier, lighter, freer,’ said Masha.     Each word felt like a benediction. Happier. Healthier. Lighter. Freer.     "On the last day of your stay with us, you will come to me and you will say this: Masha, you were right! I am not the same person I was. I am healed. I am free of all the negative habits and chemicals and toxins and thoughts that were holding me back. My body and mind are clear. I am changed in ways I could never have imagined.’     What a load of crap , thought Frances, while simultaneously thinking,  Please let it be true .     She imagined driving home in ten days: pain-free, energized, her head cold cured, her back as flexible as an elastic band, the hurt and humiliation of her romance scam long gone, washed clean! She would walk tall, stand tall. She would be ready for whatever happened with the new book. The review would have faded to nothing. pg 169 Carmel: She’d told her sister that she was going to spend the time they were away eating paleo and doing cardio and weights and yoga. The plan was to transform her body. pg 171 Carmel: She’d told her sister that she was going to spend the time they were away eating paleo and doing cardio and weights and yoga. The plan was to transform her body. pg 178 The new Yao slept through the night and woke up in the morning refreshed. The new Yao no longer thought obsessively about his fiancée in bed with another man. The new Yao rarely thought of Bernadette at all, and eventually completely eradicated her from his thoughts. The new Yao lived in the moment and was passionate about ‘wellness’, inspired by Masha’s vision for Tranquillum House. Instead of just patching people up, like Yao had done as a paramedic, the plan was to transform people, in the same way that he himself had been transformed. It felt like religion, except everything they did was based on science and evidence-based research. pg 183 Her demeanour would normally have made Frances bristle, and she wasn’t yet quite so Zen that she didn’t note the fact that she had the right to bristle. She was the paying guest turning up at the appointed time, thank you very much, not the hired help. But she didn’t sigh or clear her throat or wriggle because she was very nearly transformed, definitely thinner, and yesterday she did two push-ups in a row on her toes. She’d probably look very similar to Masha quite soon. pg 201     When Masha, an extraordinarily fit and healthy-looking woman, clearly passionate about what she did (his wife mistrusted passion and Zoe was still young enough to find it embarrassing, but Napoleon found it admirable), had spoken on the first day about how this experience would change them ‘in ways they could never have imagined’, Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.       While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation. pg 305 She thought that Masha had badly overestimated her guests’ commitment to transformation. When people said they came to Tranquillum House to be ‘enlightened’, what they really meant was ‘skinnier’. 11. Lars thinks to himself in chapter 15: “He never ceased to be amazed by the obedience of people at these places. They allowed themselves to be dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, ricked and prodded, all in the name of ‘transformation.’” Do you agree? What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever had done to you for health/beauty reasons? I think if you're desperate enough to change, you'll do anything. I also think a lot of people want to skip the hard work and just be transformed already. Thing is, the transformation comes from the hard work...or near-death experience, and I'm   not  promoting those. I've had the experience of grabbing onto the universe by the horns for my transformations. I've also had the experience of having the universe throw me over the fence with the aforementioned horns. Bottom line:   If you resist change, the universe will force you to evolve. Just make sure that change is what you want. As far as "odd" activities for health/beauty reasons, I have tried an ice bath — not great since I'm already an icicle at base level — and tried cupping therapy — and just ended up looking like I was attacked by an octopus. No shame in anybody trying anything to help them feel better. That's self care — no matter how odd it may be! As far as the characters going to great lengths for transformation, Delilah, a 'wellness consultant' at Tranquillum House hit a nail somewhere on the head with   page 305  saying,       "When people said they came to Tranquillum House to be ‘enlightened’, what they really meant was ‘skinnier’." That's probably the base hope for any sort of transition. Who doesn't feel better losing some weight? But that's a surface thing. Being "dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, ricked and prodded" is only worth it if these methods lead you to the deeper transformation. Sitting in a meditation suite won't give you the answers, but meditating — meditating anywhere — will give your mind a break to allow answers to come to you. Being dipped in mud won't melt the fat off your body but it will remind you of the sensation of your body and the importance to reconnect with it. Delilah continues her sentiments on   page 308 :      "Obviously Delilah tried the psychedelic therapy too. Her experience had been awesome, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think any of those feelings or so-called ‘revelations’ were real. They were just drugs. She’d done magic mushrooms before. It was like mistaking lust for love, or thinking that the sentimental feelings you got when you heard a certain song were genuine. Get real. Those feelings were manufactured." Even the drugs don't give you immediate "enlightenment." It's the journey with the (safely consumed) drugs that opens you up to better opportunities." But to take drugs for transformation?? Frances explains on   page 356 :     "Even the drugs hadn’t truly concerned her. The fact was that if Masha had asked, ‘Would you like to try this smoothie laced with LSD?’ Frances might have said, ‘Sure, why not?’ She would have been impressed by all the talk about ‘research’, comforted by Yao’s background as a paramedic and intrigued by the possibility of a transcendent experience, and she would have been especially susceptible if someone else had said yes first. (As a teenager, her mother had once said to her, ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?’ Frances had answered, without guile, ‘Of course.’)" I think if you're desperate enough to change, you'll do anything. That being said, the change comes from the hard work. Not snail mucus skincare, not sound healing with tuning forks, not colonics, salt therapy, coffee enemas, mud baths, dry brushing, or wrapping yourself in plastic. Hard work. Here are more spots of interest for this question: pg 65     ‘That smoothie was pretty good,’ said Ben, his mouth full of apple. ‘But I’m starved. I don’t know if my body can cope without pizza for ten days. I don’t see why we even have to do that part! What’s that got to do with marriage counseling?’     ‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s, like, a holistic approach. We have to work on everything: our minds, bodies and spirits.’     ‘Sounds like a load of —’ pg 127     [Frances] recalled what Ellen has said when she suggested this place. "Their approach is really quite unconventional.’ Ellen was her friend. She wouldn’t send her somewhere   dangerous  . . . would she? Just to lose three kilos? You’d want to lose a lot more than three kilos if they were doing something dangerous. What could it be? Walking across burning coals for enlightenment? Frances would absolutely not do that. She didn’t even like walking across hot sand at the beach. pg 130-131     Lars saw there was only one empty mat. He was the last guest to arrive. He wondered if he’d made the most fuss about being dragged from his bed. He never ceased to be amazed by the obedience of people at these places. They allowed themselves to be dipped in mud, wrapped in plastic, starved and deprived, pricked and prodded, all in the name of ‘transformation’.     Of course, Lars did too, but he was prepared to draw the line when necessary. For example, he drew the line at enemas. Also, he did not want to ever, ever discuss his bowel movements. pg 132     ‘Namaste,’ said Masha. ‘Thank you for leaving your beds for tonight’s starlight meditation. I am grateful to you for your flexibility, for opening your hearts and minds to new experiences. I am proud of you.’     She was   proud  of them. How condescending. She didn’t even know them! They were her clients. They were paying for this. And yet Lars felt a sense of satisfaction in the garden, as if everyone wanted Masha to be proud of them.     “The retreat you are about to undertake combines ancient Eastern healing wisdom and herbal treatments with the latest cutting-edge advances in Western medicine. I want you to know that although I am not a practicing Buddhist, I have incorporated certain Buddhist philosophies into our practices here.’      Yeah, yeah, East meets West, never heard that before , thought Lars.     “This won’t take very long. I’m not going to say much. The stars will do the talking for me. Isn’t it funny how we forget to look up at the stars? We scurry about like ants in our day-to-day lives and look, just look, what’s up above our heads! All your life you look down. It’s time to look up, to see the stars!’     Lars looked at the sky emblazoned with stars.     The big guy on his left gave a chesty cough. So did the busty blonde on his right. Jesus. He should be wearing some sort of sanitation mask. If he came back from this thing with a cold, he wouldn’t be happy.     Masha said, ‘Some of you may have heard of the word koan. A koan is a paradox or puzzle that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them on their quest towards enlightenment. The most famous one is this: What is the sound of one hand clapping ?’     Oh Lord. The website had given the impression that this place leaned more towards luxury wellness. Lars had a daily yoga and meditation practice, but he preferred his health retreats to avoid too much embarrassing cultural appropriation. pg 312 But they weren’t okay. Nothing she’d thought last night had been real. It was all just drugs. Drugs lied. Drugs fucked you up. She and Ben knew that better than anyone. Sometimes Ben’s mother sat and cried over the pictures of Lucy before she fell for the lies of drugs. Now that was a ‘transformation’. Final Thoughts I think reading this transformed me, too. And I didn't have to travel to Australia for it! I've since caught myself eating fast and slowed down the process by enjoying each bite. I tell myself to stop being a Carmel when looking at my body. I get down in the dumps about "glory days" like Tony and I know there are better days ahead. I haven't experienced loss like the Marconi's have, but their enduring hope of changes has nested within me. Bravo to Liane Moriarty with this one. I might read it for a fourth time now...just because Masha is right, I may return to my daily life and, like page 84 says, might only experience a temporary change and return to my default settings. Transformation is a consistent choice to yourself. Unanswered Book Questions I kept all of discussion questions in mind while reading the novel but the above questions in particular elicited the most out of me. Check out the   Nine Perfect Strangers Reading Group Guide  from Flat Iron Books for more questions to the story. I'm curious about your answers to the discussion questions! The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest   ( page 387 ), Katherine Arkady

Introduction You're choosing your words very, very carefully. Every sentence is technically correct—but deliberately vague. This playlist was built for the writer channeling a high-stakes, high-power voice  while penning a memo that’s just ambiguous enough to protect your character (and maybe implicate someone else). It’s all about control, tone, and plausible deniability. But the thing is, the...substances—they're starting to kick in. You've got to be meticulously measured, perfectly vague, and full of subtle implications but you're also * this close* to being implicated on some drug charges. This playlist was created for the writer channeling their inner corporate strategist, legal fixer, or white-collar antihero—who maybe has a problem with...snow. You're working on a scene where the stakes are high, reputations are on the line, and every word of that memo could make or break a career—or a cover up. Just cover up that residue, okay? For a shadowy executive issuing calculated warnings. For a compliance officer trying to sound cooperative while withholding just enough. Expect understated tension, ambient control, and steady, composed vibes that match the energy of characters who are playing a very careful game. This one’s for when you’re not saying everything —just enough to keep the wolves (and dealers) at bay. And scroll down for writing tips! The Set List Goodbye Stranger (2010 Remastered) Supertramp Breakfast In America The Man Who Sold the World David Bowie The Man Who Sold the World Rapture (Remastered 2001) Blondie Autoamerican (Remastered 2001) Andante in C Minor Nicholas Britell Succession: Season 1 (HBO Original Series Soundtrack) Helicopter Bloc Party Little Thoughts - EP Paranoid Android Radiohead OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: III. Dies irae (feat. Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor) Nikolaus Harnoncourt  & Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart: Requiem, K. 626 Where Is My Mind? Pixies Death to the Pixies No Church In The Wild No Church in the Wild JAY Z & Kanye West Watch The Throne (Deluxe) Take Five The Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out Tips for Writing a Legally Ambiguous Memo Scene: 1. Precision Without  Clarity Legally ambiguous memos are crafted to sound intelligent and thorough—while revealing as little as possible. The language dense enough to bury implications under polite professionalism. Use terms like “pending review,” “internal alignment,”  or “further clarification may be needed”  to give the illusion of motion without making promises. 2. Passive Voice Is Your Frenemy Want to write a sentence where no one gets blamed, but something clearly went wrong? Passive voice  is your best friend. It distances the subject from the action while keeping the tone formal and non-confrontational. Use it sparingly and strategically. Too much sounds suspicious. Just enough sounds careful. Example: Active: “John deleted the financial records.” Passive: “The financial records appear to have been removed.” 3. Use Strategic Vagueness Say just enough  to imply awareness—but never enough to commit to an action, outcome, or admission. This is the art of CYA , otherwise known as Cover Your Ass[ets]. Common phrases: “At this time, we are not aware of any wrongdoing.” “It is currently unclear whether standard protocol was followed.” “Further investigation may be warranted.” 4. Obscure With Jargon (But Don’t Overdo It) Bureaucratic and legal language can be used to overwhelm and distract. Include just enough industry speak and acronyms  to make it sound official—but keep it readable enough that readers don't entirely check out. Use acronyms, legal terms, and departmental references to signal authority while remaining opaque. Example: “As per alignment with Q1 compliance strategies and ESG guidelines, mitigation protocols are currently under internal evaluation.” 5. Imply Consequences Without Naming Them Instead of spelling out problems or threats, hint at underlying risk. This keeps deniability intact while making it clear something’s wrong . The implication does the heavy lifting. Let the reader’s imagination do the rest. Examples: “The timeline of events may have contributed to misalignment across departments.” “Additional transparency measures will be considered moving forward.” 6. Layer in Corporate Politeness Everything should sound cordial and professional—even if you're low-key throwing someone under the bus. The more serious the situation, the more pleasant  the tone becomes. It’s almost sinister. Use phrases like: “To avoid further miscommunication…” “In the interest of transparency…” “We appreciate your patience during this process…” 7. Redirect the Responsibility Need to bury something? Pass the buck—but gracefully. Refer to other departments, external consultants, or upcoming reviews. Keep your character insulated—either by assigning responsibility to a faceless committee or redirecting to a future decision. Examples: “Legal is currently reviewing the documentation.” “We’ve looped in Compliance for further recommendations.” 8. End with a Calm, Cautious Wrap-Up No matter how chaotic the content, the ending should soothe. The final paragraph should sound like a PR sedative—enough to ease nerves while saying almost nothing concrete. Something like: “We will continue to monitor the situation closely.” “We are committed to ensuring best practices moving forward.” “Further updates will be provided as necessary.” Links to My Playlist Profiles YouTube Music Profile   | Spotify Profile In all seriousness, if you need help with substance use, contact The National Drug Helpline 24/7 at drughelpline.org or (844) 289-0879. There's more to you than your addiction. Keep the synergy, Katherine Arkady

Introduction You’ve written a sentence, then deleted it. You've written it again, then tossed it aside. The words don’t come as easily as they used to, and with each draft, you can’t help but wonder: Is this good enough? Every phrase feels clunky, every paragraph a bit off. You’re second-guessing every word, questioning your own process, and wondering if it’s even worth sharing at all. But this is part of the journey. The doubt, the frustration, the constant revision—it’s all part of what makes a writer’s path unique. To capture the essence of those moments when you feel stuck, you need a playlist that embraces the internal struggle: a mix of uncertainty, determination, and the quiet moments of inspiration that keep you going. So take a deep breath, turn on the music, and let the rhythm remind you: the process is messy, but it’s always moving forward . And scroll down for writing tips! The Set List Writing's On The Wall (From "Spectre" Soundtrack) Sam Smith In The Lonely Hour (10th Anniversary Edition) Dreams Fleetwood Mac 50 Years - Don't Stop Boulevard of Broken Dreams Green Day Boulevard of Broken Dreams The Way It Is Bruce Hornsby & The Range Greatest Radio Hits CALLIGRAPHY Saba CARE FOR ME Pursuit Of Happiness (Nightmare) (feat. MGMT & Ratatat) Kid Cudi Man On The Moon: The End Of Day About You Final Draft About You Don't Stop Believin' Journey Time ³ Caffeine Max Drazen Caffeine Rewrite Darling Thieves The Extended Play Tips for Writing About Your Writing Process (Without Second-Guessing Every Word): 1. Write Like You're Talking to a Friend How would you describe your process in a casual conversation? Aim for that voice and vernacular. 2. Embrace the Messiness Your writing process isn’t perfect, and that’s what makes it interesting ! Be honest about the struggles, quirks, and breakthroughs. We're in this together and its not a good idea to hide it 3. Start With a Story Instead of only making a listicle à la Buzzfeed , share a personal anecdote about a time you struggled (or succeeded) in your writing journey. Because personally, when I'm creating each of these playlist posts, I hope that the hints in the end ultimately help writers out like the playlists have helped me out. 4. Stop Editing While You Write Let the first draft be ugly —perfectionism is the enemy of progress. You can refine later. 5. Remember: Nobody Expects Perfection Readers appreciate authenticity more than polished, soulless writing. Your unique perspective is what makes it valuable. 6. Set a Time Limit Give yourself a deadline—sometimes forcing yourself to hit publish is the best way to break free from second-guessing. 7. Done Is Better Than Perfect DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. DONE IS BETTER THAN PERECT!! At some point, you have to trust yourself and hit publish. Your words matter—even if you feel like they don’t. Links to My Playlist Profiles YouTube Music Profile   | Spotify Profile This one is done, and that's better than perfect 💚 Katherine Arkady

Introduction Something’s not right— The air is thick with dread, the kind of unsettling chill that crawls up your spine and refuses to let go. Every shadow seems to move, every creak of the floorboards sounds too loud, and that strange feeling of being watched lingers just out of sight. Your character’s skin prickles with the unmistakable sensation of impending danger, their every step heavier as the eerie silence deepens. This chapter isn’t just about fear; it’s about building tension, slowly winding the psychological tightrope until the final, terrifying moment. To make your reader feel the same unease, you need a playlist that matches the sinister vibe—full of creeping notes, unexpected jolts, and the ominous atmosphere of something just beyond comprehension. So crank up the eerie sounds, and let the music guide you as you write the kind of freaky scene that will make your character—and your readers—wish they had left the lights on. And scroll down for writing tips! The Set List bury a friend Billie Eilish WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? Black Mambo Glass Animals Glass Animals Dust To Dust Chromatics Kill For Love Tear You Apart She Wants Revenge She Wants Revenge Haunted Type O Negative October Rust Ghost Hardware Burial Untrue Will He Joji Will He In the House - In a Heartbeat John Murphy In the House - In a Heartbeat Crimson Skott A Letter from the Universe Seven Devils Florence + The Machine Ceremonials Tips for Writing an Effectively Creepy Scene: 1. Use the “Less is More” Approach Fear thrives in the unknown , so don’t over-explain! Your reader's imagination can fill in the holes--with their own personal brand of fearsome energy. 2. Build Up Slow, Then Strike Dread is most effective when it simmers. Let small, unsettling details snowball into full-blown terror. 3. Engage All the Senses Fear isn’t just seen —it’s heard, smelled, felt. Describe the stale air, the creaking floor, or the feeling of being watched . 4. Make the Fear Personal What specific object, thought, person, action, etc. would terrify your character? A childhood fear? A past trauma? The best horror taps into something deeply personal. 5. Play With Perception Is the horror real or in their head? Unreliable narrators, hallucinations, and paranoia make a scene even more unsettling. Make the readers question themselves! 6. Break Up the Rhythm Short, fragmented sentences. Yes. The panic! It can make the pacing erratic. Uncertain. The exact goal. 7. Leave Readers With an Unresolved Chill The ending doesn't necessarily have to be wrapped up with a bow. A lingering sense of unease is what makes creepy scenes stick. Links to My Playlist Profiles YouTube Music Profile   | Spotify Profile Stay weird, Katherine Arkady

Introduction The room feels charged, the air thick with desire. Every glance, every touch, sends a wave of anticipation through the characters—and through you. The world outside has faded away, leaving only the heat between them, simmering and undeniable. It's a moment of raw, unfiltered connection, where the lines between longing and action blur, and the chemistry ignites in ways that make even you blush. Writing this scene is an art—capturing the vulnerability, the intensity, and that heady rush of passion without crossing into something that's too much . You need a playlist that matches the rising tension, the heartbeat of attraction, and the sweet surrender of a love that's both playful and electric. So, turn up the heat, hit play, and let the music guide you as you write the scene that'll make your readers' hearts race—and yours too. 🌶️ And scroll down for writing tips! The Set List Make You Feel Alina Baraz  & Galimatias Urban Flora Special Affair The Internet Special Affair Speechless Beyoncé Dangerously In Love Lips on You Maroon 5 Red Pill Blues First SoMo The Answers Trip Switch Nothing But Thieves Nothing But Thieves (Deluxe) Often The Weeknd Beauty Behind The Madness I Put A Spell On You Creedence Clearwater Revival Creedence Clearwater Revival (Expanded Edition) Moments In Love The Art Of Noise Daft Didn't Cha Know Erykah Badu Mama's Gun Where to Find Tips for Spicy Writing 🌶️ I'm not the type to write spice. But here are some links to folk that know the tricks of the trade: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Smut Fic by Quinn Anderson : Quinn Anderson is author of works like the Murmur Inc. series, Fourteen Summers , and Are You Kitten Me . Quinn Anderson is an alumna of the University of Dublin in Ireland and has a master’s degree in psychology. She wrote her dissertation on sexuality in popular literature and continues to explore evolving themes in erotica in her professional life. This ultimate guide is the ultimate guide and covers topics like Reaction Words, Adverbs, Sexy Alternatives to "Said," Generally Sexy Actions, Kissing, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, Penetrative Intercourse, First Times and Losing Virginities, The Orgasm (.:chorus of angels:.), Generally Acceptable Slang Terms, Feelings When Aroused, Sexy Words, Things that Sound Good Until You Imagine Someone Actually Doing Them and Some Dos and Don'ts of Smut Writing She also included references! We love our references on this website! This woman knows her smut. Read the comprehensive guide here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955716?view_adult=true Things I Wish People Would Include When They Write Smut by L. G. Estrella https://lgestrella.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/things-i-wish-people-would-include-when-they-write-smut/ Furthermore, Estrella has much to say about Writing Technique that's worth a look! A Guide Barely Anybody Asked For: Writing Smut Foreplay 101 by pocmuzings on Tumblr Covers general sex tips; how to write about handjobs, fingering, and oral; and writing tips about orgasms. https://pocmuzings.tumblr.com/post/190769535197/a-guide-barely-anybody-asked-for-writing-smut How to Write a Sex Scene by Steve Almond In this article, Steve unfolds his witty 12-Step Program for Writing Incredibly Hot Scenes My favorite is Step 3 This 2005 article is still relevant and can be found on Utne Reader— a digital digest of the new ideas and fresh perspectives percolating in arts, culture, politics, and spirituality: https://www.utne.com/arts/how-to-write-a-sex-scene/ “The Smut Writer’s Dictionary” by maybeeatspaghetti on Tumblr This is a great reference to look back at while you're in the trenches of writing those scenes. Got the words there and ready separated by categories of Arousal/Anticipation, What People Look Like, General Movement, General Touching, Kissing/Rimming, Noises, Verbs for Speaking, Preparation, Cooldown/Cleanup, and a lot—( a lot) —more. https://maybeeatspaghetti.tumblr.com/post/635233596627714048/can-i-have-a-smutty-dictionary-or-a-list-of This is not the complete list and there are several other websites and forums out there to help you with your 🌶️ spice levels 🌶️ in fiction. Links to My Playlist Profiles YouTube Music Profile   | Spotify Profile We all need a little spice in our lives, Katherine Arkady