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Happy birthday me. You're old now.

Just some thoughts on turning twenty.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (the fact twenty-one is the cut off, the time when women must become self-conscious of their age. It’s a different time, sure, but it’s still strange to be on this precipice…), Mitski, ‘Class of 2013′, extract of a poem I wrote (tormented by how birthdays sometimes seem an endurance test, it is a miracle to still be alive, to have outlived others, the privilege of growing up and growing old, and yet it is all so exhausting to know you still have decades of life to get through, joy and pain, etc.), Unknown seventeenth-century painter from the Veneto, Portrait of Angela Adorni Sbardellini, Prioress of the Zitelle (I like the contrast between her and her costume, the complicated creases and folds vs her still young face, she seems a girl peeking out of an adult body), Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals, Florence + the Machine, ‘Free’, picture of Marilyn Monroe at twenty, Luke Hemmings, ‘Diamonds’ 

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moon and rainbow at sunrise by mark ham

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I'm basically like if a girl had stuff to do and then didn't do it

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My latest cartoon for Guardian Books

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What is the difference between The Secret History and If We Were Villains?

For two stories with themes that are so similar—be it the cultist college students, the dead haunting the narrative, the deplorable acts, the so-called ‘inadequate’ protagonist—they are not identical. Let me explain.

The secret history is a criticism of those who base their actions purely on the aesthetic and superficiality, while if we were villains shows the punishment of those who fail to differentiate between what is real and what is fiction.

The secret history is a full-fledged novel. It it about six-hundred pages of someone so used to being an outsider that he commits murder along with his classmates to feel part of the group. It doesn’t dance around the act with delicate prose and poetry, and there’s no valid reason to it either, but you don’t question it. Every single character from Donna Tartt’s book is morally grey from the start, with few moments of humanity, which you could say makes the reader numb to even something as evil as murder, or it is possibly the unreliable narrator trick she uses. Has this truly happened? Was bunny truly a horrible person or was this just Richard’s point of view?

If we were villains is a play. A Shakespearean tragedy. It’s written as one, intended to be and everyone has their specific role, unmovable and unchanging. Rio states the character’s roles clearly, through foreshadowing mostly. James being cast as Brutus, or Macbeth was no coincidence because, as stated at the beginning of the book, life and art imitate eachother. The only character who’s evil, per se, is Richard (the other one), and is our antagonist. Meredith: the temptress, the seducer. Filippa and Alexander: the masterminds.

Is If We Were Villains a copy of The Secret History? In some ways, maybe. I can’t deny the parallels. But, honestly, I think the biggest difference of all is this: Rio’s finale spikes hope, Tartt’s speaks of consequence.

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“it’s starting to smell like pumpkin spice!”

“it’s starting to smell like scary movies!”

no.

it’s starting to smell like, the snow in the mountains was melting and bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to realize the gravity of our situation.

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reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

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Yes. Also, his hair. Tnx.

Hozier - The Humours Of Whiskey.

❝ and boys I half wonder if lighting and thunder was made from the plunder of whiskey, me boys. ❞

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why need a job? is it not enough to be well-dressed and have slightly evil thoughts?

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My girlfriend is turning 32 soon… 

I’ve told her not to get her hopes up. “After all,” I say, “we’re only going to celebrate it for half a minute” when she asked what in the world I was talking about, I pointed out “This is your thirty-second birthday”

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Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

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“Maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a person.”

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I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited.

- Jorge Luis Borges

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“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

- The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)