I love your writing. It is superbly delicate and harsh, self effacing and protective. Descriptive in ways so surprising in your use of language. You use metaphors never imagined. I look for them gleefully. Sometimes it is difficult to finish a story, because I look for these metaphors like Hirschfeld NINA's. You go deep and come up for air. Just when I feel your vanity is too much, you hit me with candor and I feel, yeah maybe she doesn't think she's all that or she's had some deep sadness and profound loss. I'm hooked.
*Loooove this so much! I have been contemplating lately how age is the last acceptable bias. Laurie illuminates the intersectionality of femaleness in a deeply vulnerable way that strikes me as personal to the author and to this reader. I mean, this line ... "If you are a female human—and many other kinds of human—your life is a trail of insults that leads to someone telling you what you can eat."