Anthropology of an American Girl
By Hilary Thayer Hamman
Summary
"Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl touched a nerve among readers, who identified with the sexual and intellectual awakening of its heroine, a young woman on the brink of adulthood. A moving depiction of the transformative power of first love, Hamann’s first novel follows Eveline Auerbach from her high school years in East Hampton, New York, in the 1970s through her early adulthood in the moneyed, high-pressured Manhattan of the 1980s.
Centering on Evie’s fragile relationship with her family and her thwarted love affair with Harrison Rourke, a professional boxer, the novel is both a love story and an exploration of the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world. As Evie surrenders to the dazzling emotional highs of love and the crippling loneliness of heartbreak, she strives to reconcile her identity with the constraints that all relationships—whether those familial or romantic, uplifting to the spirit or quietly detrimental—inherently place on us. Though she stumbles and strains against social conventions, Evie remains a strong yet sensitive observer of the world around her, often finding beauty and meaning in unexpected places.
Newly edited and revised since its original publication, Anthropology of an American Girl is an extraordinary piece of writing, original in its vision and thrilling in its execution."
-Goodreads.com
Quotations
“It’s confusing how you’re supposed to weep over people who die recklessly, but you’re supposed to be disgusted by Dorothy. A calculated decision to die seems less disrespectful than putting yourself in a position to deport accidentally. Was Dorothy weal, or brave like crazy to have sliced herself? And then to survive the damage, and then to have to return to school because anything was better than staying home? It was that double failure that moved me the most -- the failure of her life and the failure of her attempt to end it.”
“I wondered why no one ever listed patience as a characteristic of wild animals; I felt patient, the wild animal way … "
“Love is exactly like starlight he’d said. By that he meant that love had its time, which is not necessarily your time. You have to be big, I think, or old or brave or rich or mad, or something other than I knew myself and Jack to be, to make loves time your own.”
“Certain conditions are not meant to be tolerated, certains states are so deprived of tenderness that you discover the meaning of hell. Hell is only loneliness, a place without the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is a presence?”
“Mark told me the animals have no memory of home. And yet I could see traces of savagery and pride. In order to preserve, they assign home to a position within themselves; they store it, safeguard it. By their eyes they say -- We will return. Look into the eyes of anyone who has suffered diaspora and you will find a home, implicit and original, glinting like speckles of starlight. You will envy them. You will wish their home was your home. You will know irony because you have nothings as substantial to assist your identity."
“We blame groups. Blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected, especially if the group you blame applied in Sunday’s New York Times. When I say “we” I do not mean me, though I cannot exempt myself insofar as I am present. When a pack of wolves mangels are carcass it doesn't matter which one’s not eating that much."
“If Denny had been killed by a falling air conditioner, everyone would have said that it was destiny. People would have to say that, just to give meaning to something meaningless. But he didn't die, and so the incident becomes irrelevant and remains largely undiscussed, which is regrettable, because of all the remarkable things about life the most remarkable are the near misses."
“It is awful to see him hit, but worse to see him step expectantly into pain.”
“And you said, ‘Kate, you speak the language. You can’t get lost. Getting lost just means not understanding.’”
“The day was mine, I’d decided, and even if it wasn't, Intended to take it. In old film noir movies, the detective takes on someone else’s problem, and in the process of solving it solves his own. He works backward through the crime while moving forward in his mind to crack his own riddle. In such narrative the crime is a metaphor, and the riddle is a metaphor, and quite possibly, the beginning at the end is also a metaphor, a prescriptive for successful living. The way it goes is this - The story starts when I enter it.”
“And then running more, running again, not stopping until I collapse. Until a wall, there must be a wall. Am I mad? Yes, I think I must be. There is no wall in life, nothing to meet, nothing to hit, there is only running then more running.”