Chapter 1: Izzy
Page 3 • Nov 13, 2025
the color of “crushed burgundy,” whatever that means. I’d said, “I don’t think you can crush burgundy
Page 4 • Nov 13, 2025
There are over a hundred guests here tonight, each of them dressed to the nines, and if this isn’t hell, I don’t know what is.
Page 4 • Nov 13, 2025
We pride ourselves on being the premier family-oriented mental health facility in the country, and all the stuff Mama is saying to me is very much not sanctioned by the company’s philosophy. Not that she gives a crap.
Page 5 • Nov 13, 2025
It’s not an uncommon occurrence for my voice to go unheard in my family. Everyone else is so loud, and I am so mousy that, more often than not, I could mutter some nonsensical answer and they’d nod, their gazes somewhere over my shoulder, and go, “Uh-huh, okay, great talk,” before brushing past me.
Page 5 • Nov 13, 2025
she exudes the confidence of every mediocre white male who has managed to fail upward in life.
Page 7 • Nov 13, 2025
“Oh, they’re besties!” Straight girls must have it so easy.
Chapter 3: Magnolia
Page 20 • Nov 13, 2025
No, you listen to Mama. You use that time and find yourself a man with potential. Someone with a real future. That’s the only reason college is worth going to in the first place.”
An Interlude: Izzy
Page 40 • Nov 14, 2025
She smirks at me. “I’m just fucking with you, Izzy.”
“Nainai!”
She laughs. “Am I not supposed to say ‘fuck’?”
“Definitely not, and definitely not to your grandkids. Jesus, Nainai.”
“My, lots of rules for seventy-three-year-old women.”
Page 128 • Nov 15, 2025
“It took years for me to consider what is even the point of being ‘normal.’ The only reason to be ‘normal’ is to make everyone else around you comfortable. Putting everyone else, even strangers, before yourself. As Fry from Futurama said: ‘What’s the point of being normal when you can be abnormal?’ ”
Chapter 5: Magnolia
Page 45 • Nov 14, 2025
The other thing I didn’t know about sex was who I was actually attracted to. Because up until I met Ellery that very morning, I’d chugged along through life thinking I was straight. It was the kind of thing I never questioned, like breathing. Why do you breathe air? Who the hell cares? Everyone breathes the same air. Why was I straight? I was straight because I assumed I was, because I never knew anything different.
Chapter 6: Magnolia
Page 60 • Nov 14, 2025
Girls are safe. Girls are no threat to my purity.
Page 62 • Nov 14, 2025
Ellery kissing a girl. I was so confused. On the one hand, I was really disappointed. On the other hand, I didn’t know why I would be disappointed, because I was straight.
Chapter 8: Magnolia
Page 87 • Nov 14, 2025
I’d never, up to that point, been in love with someone who was so close and yet so incredibly out of reach. And to make matters more complicated, I still hadn’t figured out by then that I was in love with Ellery, because she was a girl, and I was a girl, and I was into boys, and that was that. I attributed the yawping pain to sheer loneliness, to wanting what Ellery had with Trish instead of wanting Ellery herself.
Chapter 9: Magnolia
Page 90 • Nov 15, 2025
Is it the idea that your grandmother experiences lust? Deal with it, kid.
Page 91 • Nov 15, 2025
“Oh yeah, great train of thought, Mags. Blame it on the girl. She can’t possibly dislike a guy because he’s an actual ass. Nooo, it’s gotta be because she secretly has a crush on him.”
Chapter 10: Magnolia
Page 109 • Nov 15, 2025
She’d missed so much of my childhood. I didn’t hold it against her, and I still don’t. She was grappling with a lot, including her own identity as a woman, as a doctor, and as a wife. But just because you don’t hold something against someone doesn’t mean it stops hurting you.
that hits home
Chapter 11: Magnolia
Page 142 • Nov 15, 2025
I know that you, being American, probably won’t understand this, but they’re not wrong. I have often heard relatives whispering about some “poor woman” with a PhD turning into a spinster because she’s “too smart for her own good.”
Chapter 12: Magnolia
Page 154 • Nov 15, 2025
“Because whose vagina will the kid be ripping out of? Did you know that some women tear from vagina to anus during birth? Whose body is it going to destroy? Guys don’t have to worry about that at all, so why should they get all the credit?”
Eten put down his latte with exaggerated care, obviously trying to buy time to think. “Because it’s tradition, that’s how it’s always been done.”
“So were public executions. They used to be tradition in many countries.”
“What?” Eten sputtered.
“I’m just saying, a lot of ridiculous things used to be commonly carried out and accepted as tradition. But we don’t do them anymore. Just because things used to be done a certain way doesn’t mean we have to continue doing them that way. It doesn’t make them right.”
Chapter 14: Magnolia
Page 167 • Nov 15, 2025
Mama, who had sensed that this would be the night, squeezed my hand when I came down the stairs. She smiled at me, her eyes shining. I thought she might tell me she loved me, or some other form of motherly affection, but what she actually said was “You have fulfilled our expectations.”
im so angry
Page 173 • Nov 15, 2025
“It makes me look bad too, Maggie. It’s emasculating, can’t you see that?”
because her parents pay a part of the wedding?
Chapter 17: Magnolia
Page 201 • Nov 15, 2025
Then Papa said, “Iris.” And from the tone of his voice, my entire body tensed. So did Iris’s. I put my hand over hers. “This is why we kept trying to teach you, time and again, to give in. Not to be so hotheaded.”
tellg this your own daughter afer her husband did physically ase he. thats pure victim blaming fuck him
Chapter 23: Magnolia
Page 283 • Nov 15, 2025
“Yes, I was, you dumbass. I was so in love with you that I broke up with my girlfriend because of it.”
Chapter 24: Magnolia
Page 298 • Nov 15, 2025
I couldn’t dwell on it for long because I had Hazel to look after. Hazel didn’t understand the concept of death. She would say things like “When Mommy stop dying? When Mommy come back?”