“If you and I met at one of our children’s birthday parties, in the hallway at work, or at a neighbor’s barbecue, you’d never guess my secret: that as a young woman I fell in love with and married a man who beat me regularly and nearly killed me.
I don’t look the part. I have an MBA and an undergraduate degree from Ivy League schools. I live in a red brick house on a tree-lined street in one of the prettiest neighborhoods in Washington, DC. I’ve got 15 years of marketing experience at Fortune 500 companies and a best-selling book about motherhood to my name…
We all have secrets we don’t reveal the first time we cross paths with others. This is mine.”
“Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.”
“Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. … The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.”
“There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don’t become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five.”
“Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.”
***
Pair the book with Andrew Solomon’s incredible TED talk below.
“It’s just that I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too.”
“It’s just hard to see a friend hurt this much. Especially when you can’t do anything except ‘be there.’ I just want to make him stop hurting, but I can’t. So I just follow him around whenever he wants to show me his world.”
“We didn’t talk about anything heavy or light. We were just there together. And that was enough.”
“I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they’re here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It’s like looking at all the students and wondering who’s had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.”
“Downtown. Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
***
I’ll admit, I haven’t read the book (yet).
But I did rent the movie on iTunes, and it did change my life. And I’m not even a big fiction person. You won’t catch me reading Twilight, and I even thought Life of Pi was just ehhh,okay as far as stories go. I have a definite predilection towards nonfiction. Even when it comes to films…I’m addicted to documentaries. A fictional story has to be beyond exceptional for me to jump on the bandwagon. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is that exception and more. I fell in love with this story–it’s as honest and true as stories come, and it stole my heart. No matter who you are or what age you are, if you have a pulse, this story is for you.
Read the book, watch the movie, fall in love.
(In no particular order)
“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”
***
I am, admittedly, a Malcom Gladwell enthusiast, fanatic, and devotee. Ergo, I’ve provided some fascinating videos of him below. So even if you don’t have time to read The Tipping Pointor any of his other remarkable books, you can still have a little dose of Malcolm in your day.
***
“You have to reverse the normal human tendency, which is, to edit.”
“As human beings, we need to be reminded that every little micro-universe is different…The minute you look below the surface, things are different–than A) what you thought they would be, but B) they’re different from your own experience.”
“Popularity is only a tiny fraction of the universe of things that are great.”
grace goldoni's bookshelf 